Product line architecture (PLA) captures the architectural commonality and variability among products of a product family. Existing PLA modeling approaches are limited in the sense that (1) it is often difficult to relate a product line feature to its implementation in the PLA, and (2) variation points in the PLA have to be manually developed and maintained. In this paper, we present a novel PLA modeling approach and a toolset called ArchFeature that addresses these two challenges. ArchFeature integrates PLA and feature specification in a single monolithic architecture model. It includes a graphical modeling environment that can (1) automatically capture, maintain, and visualize the feature-PLA relationship, (2) encapsulate variability modeling from the user, and (3) support automatic derivation of architecture instances from the PLA. ArchFeature is an Eclipse plugin integrated in ArchStudio, an Eclipse-based architecture development platform. We assessed its usability and effectiveness in a case study by using it to develop a full-featured architecture model for an open-source software system, Apache Solr.
['Gharib Gharibi', 'Yongjie Zheng']
ArchFeature: integrating features into product line architecture