A Meta-Process to Support Trade-Off Analysis in Software Product Line Architecture

The software product line approach has been applied as a successful software reuse technique for specific domains. Such an approach takes advantage of domain and application engineering concepts. One of its most important artifacts is the product line architecture because it explicitly represents similarities and variabilities of a product line, as well as the products that can be generated. Product line architecture evaluation can serve as a basis for analyzing the managerial and economical values of a product line for software managers and architects. Such an evaluation might be carried out in terms of a trade-off analysis of the architecture quality attributes. Thus, this paper presents a Trade-off Analysis Meta-Process for Product Line Architecture, the TAMPro-PLA. TAMPro-PLA must be instantiated to define the essential artifacts for product line architecture trade-off analysis, such as business drivers, quality attributes, and respective scenarios. Therefore, TAMPro-PLA can be used to carry out product line architecture evaluations. It differs from current literature as it allows the definition and application of prodcut line architecture quality attribute metrics to provide support for performing quantitative and qualitative analysis. A proof of concept example based on the SEI’s Arcade Game Maker (AGM) product line is presented. Keywords-meta-process, metrics, product line architecture, quality attributes, software product line, trade-off analysis.