Holistic assessment of software product line architectures: The HoPLAA approach

The emerging concept of software product line is being espoused as a promising technique for improving software development productivity and the quality of the resulting products. It involves the development, assessment and large-scale reuse of the product line architecture (PLA). The problem of PLA assessment has not been given adequate attention as compared to PLA development, even though the success of this approach relies on established methodologies for both aspects.; This research approaches the problem of PLA assessment by investigating the characteristics of the PLAs and the existing assessment methods that were developed for one-at-a-time or single products architectures (SPAs). The results of the investigation were synthesized into a new method called HoPLAA (Holistic Product Line Architecture Assessment). HoPLAA extends the ATAM (a SPA assessment method) into a holistic approach suitable for the assessment of the dual forms of architectures in a PLA (the core architecture or CA and the individual product architectures or PAs). On exercising HoPLAA with some case studies and comparing the result with those obtained from similar ATAM assessment of the same PLA, HoPLAA is found to offer a number of distinct advantages for PLA assessment.