The role of rationale in the design of product line architectures - a case study from industry

Product line engineering aims at an efficient production of variants mainly enabled by large-scale and systematic reuse of artifacts throughout all development phases. A product line's central artifact is its architecture that defines fundamental concepts, abstractions, and mechanisms that hold for all products of an organization (if successfully) for a long period of time. Therefore, key developers in organizations must fully agree on all decisions related to the definition of the product line architecture, as well as must always reunderstand their rationales during architecture evolution. This chapter describes an industrial case of architecture evolution where one of the key mechanisms of an existing architecture was revisited as potential subject of change