A Holistic Method for Assessing Software Product Line Architectures

The quest for more productive ways of developing high quality software has been ongoing and software product lines promises to improve product qua-li-ty and the development speed at a fraction of the cost. Common examples of product lines in other areas include mobile phones, cars, consumer electronic devices such as TVs and the like. The products in a product line all share some common features and there are some features that are specific to some pro-ducts only. Crucial to this approach is the large-scale reuse of the product line software architecture. This book deals with the problem of assessing, analyzing or evaluating product line architectures. It characterizes such archi-tectures from the point of view of architecture analysis and describes a ho-lis-tic method for completing the assessment. Case studies and discussions help readers use the approach described in their own projects. This book is addres-sed to professional software architects and developers building or planning to build software product lines. It is also directed to-wards researchers in Software Architectures and Software Product Lines.