Integrating reference architecture definition and reuse investment planning

When developing a product line, the definition of an appropriate reference architecture that supports the required variabilities is of crucial importance to the success of the product line. In this paper we present an approach to the identification of the key variabilities and to determining the economic benefit of packaging these variabilities in terms of reusable components. This approach provides reusability requirements that can then be taken as an input to product line development. The analysis is based on the economics of the product line. Thus, the approach ensures the optimization of the economic benefit of a product line that is based on a reference architecture that takes these reusability requirements into account. In this paper, we will describe our approach for deriving the reusability requirements, discuss its relationship to different possible investment scenarios, and study the results of the application of our approach in some case studies.