A Process for Documenting Variability Design Rationale of Flexible and Adaptive PLAs

Variability is a means for evolution of component-based architectures, driving flexible and adaptive architectures. In recent years, researches have emphasized the need for documenting architectural knowledge to maintain and evolve software, i.e. the need for documenting not only the design of the solution, but also the decisions driving the design and their rationale. However, few approaches document the architectural knowledge behind variability, known as variability design rationale. This paper presents the process for documenting variability design rationale of flexible and adaptive architectures alongside their architectural description. This process is supported by the metamodels Flexible-PLA and Product-Line Architectural Knowledge which define the modeling primitives to completely describe the structure of product-line architectures and to document variability design rationale, respectively. The tool FPLA implements these modeling primitives supporting the specification of architectural models ready to be involved in a model-driven development process. It is illustrated with an example.