A Concrete Method for Developing and Applying Product Line Architectures

Software development organizations are often deterred from introducing product line architectures by the lack of simple, ready-to-use methods for developing and applying them. The well-known, published product-line-engineering methods tend to focus on the early stages of the software life cycle and address product line issues at a high-level of abstraction. Connecting product-line concepts with established implementation technologies is thus largely left to the user. This paper introduces a method, known as the KobrA method, which addresses this problem by enabling product line concerns to be coupled with regular (non-product line) architectural artifacts, and thus introduced incrementally. By explaining how the method can be understood as a concrete instantiation of the well-established PuLSEDSSA product-line architecture approach, the paper clarifies the product line features of the KobrA method and illustrates how they can be used in tandem with established, general-purpose product line methods.