Developing long-term stable product line architectures

Abstract

Product lines are usually built for the long term in order to repay the initial investment. While long-term stable software systems are already hard, if they are developed individually, it is even harder for complete product lines. At the time a new product line is created, the details of future product line characteristics are typically not known, no matter how well and detailed scoping and planning is done. Thus, any product line needs to evolve and adapt over time to incorporate new customer requirements as well as new technology constraints. Stability of the product line architecture is very important to the successful long-term evolution of a product line. In this paper, we discuss how a form of domain decomposition, which we call conceptual architecture, can be used to guide product line engineering towards long-term viability. We will illustrate this approach in the context of a large-scale product line development and analyze the evolution properties of the product line. Transferability of the approach is suggested to other embedded software systems that drive mature, well-understood physical control system.