Institute for Software Research
A Tool Set for Change Management and Feature Propagation within a Product Family Architecture
Students: Christopher Van der Westhuizen, Akash Garg, Matt Critchlow, Ping Chen
Advisor: André van der Hoek
Currently, many modern software organizations develop closely related software products as single, unrelated efforts. As a result, many high-level design decisions are lost between products and reuse remains ineffective or limited to the code level. One solution is to create a generic design architecture, which is able to capture an entire family of closely related products, called a product line architecture (PLA). The PLA explicitly describes the common features shared by all the products as well as the points of variation among the individual products. Variation points are either optional (it is not required) or variant (it may take different forms in different products).
Comments and questions: Debra A. Brodbeck, ISR Technical Relations Director, brodbeck@uci.edu