Reference architectures and variability: current status and future perspectives

Reference architectures refer to a special type of software architecture that achieves well-recognized understanding of specific domains, promoting reuse of design expertise and facilitating the development, standardization, and evolution of software systems. Designed for various domains and purpose, they have increasingly impacted important aspects of system development, such as productivity and quality of such systems. In another perspective, variability has been considered in several research topics as a mechanism that facilitates software development and evolution. In this context, the main contribution of this paper is to present the current status regarding variability in the reference architecture engineering. It is also presented future research perspectives that could be conducted, providing new directions to the reference architecture engineering in order to become existing and new reference architectures more effective elements to the development and evolution of software-intensive systems.