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2004
Report
Titel
Definition of reference architectures based on existing systems
Titel Supplements
WP 5.2, lifecycle and process for family integration
Abstract
Migration from single system development to product family engineering is a challenging task. The success of a product family depends greatly on the quality of its reference architecture, one of the central artifacts in product family engineering. Therefore, it is important to leverage the experience embodied in successful, existing systems coming from the same domains or from the same development organization in order to achieve high-quality reference architectures. Despite the importance of leveraging existing knowledge, the literature provides limited guidance on how to mine prior, related systems for this specific purpose. This report addresses this issue by introducing the PuLSETM-DSSA1 approach that explicitly takes information from existing systems into account and gives guidance for migrating it into a product family. PuLSETM-DSSA is a method that combines forward engineering design activities together with reverse engineering tasks. In particular, we provide a systematic approach to define the reference architecture integrating experience of existing systems. Therefore, we regard the architecture as the interface between top-down design and bottom-up reverse engineering and as being the communication vehicle among stakeholders. Furthermore, we present the concept of view-based architectures and give an overview of typical views. A selection of beneficial techniques for request-driven reverse architecting in the product family context shows what kind of information can be integrated into the reference architecture. An open source case study then exemplifies how the approach works by analyzing different plug-ins of the Eclipse platform and defining a reference architecture supporting new development activities. In short, this report presents PuLSE-DSSA, an approach that integrates a systematic recovery of information from existing artifacts with activities directly working towards the goals of the overall migration. The recovery activities are thereby fully driven and controlled by the architectural design (i.e., forward engineering activities).
Verlagsort
Kaiserslautern