Proceedings of Product Line Architecture Workshop

A family is a set of products that share common features, chunks of functionality or architectural concepts. Recent research has focused on the concept of product family architecture. We describe the architectural evolution of a product family from two separate points of view. First, the reference architecture, or the abstract architecture that styles every product. Second, the configuration architecture, which describes the distribution of features into the product set. The existence of a family automatically generates a new layer in the architecture of every member product. The family layer is, naturally, less prone to change than the product-specific layer. I propose a practical framework for modeling evolution of legacy product families. The combination of information springing from the two different models should allow keeping track of the family's undocumented evolution, and estimating the impact of future changes.