Quality-based heuristic for optimal product derivation in Software Product Lines

This work aims is to offer an assessment process to support architectural decisions in the derivation of specific products of a Software Product Line (SPL) family according to customer requirements, from an optimal feasible solution among a set of feasible solutions. The approach starts from a reference architecture (RA) constructed by a bottom-up process from existing products in a domain. This RA has imbedded the domain knowledge on architectural style(s), main functionality and quality properties. Due to the difficulty of measuring quality properties at architecture design stage, an heuristic is proposed to derive an optimal feasible solution from the weights assigned to architectural choices based on this knowledge and customer requirements. Our results, that are applied to the Integrated Healthcare Information System domain, offer a practical and straightforward way of deriving SPL products that can be partially automatized, and can also be useful from a didactical point of view, to show a complete product derivation process from RA that is often missing to illustrate known approaches.