Exploring the use of reference architectures in the development of product line artifacts

Software Product Line (SPL) has arisen as an approach for developing a family of software-intensive systems at lower costs, within shorter time, and with higher quality. In particular, SPL is supported by a product line architecture (sometimes also referred to as reference architecture) that captures the architectures of a product family. In another context, a special type of architecture that contains knowledge about a specific domain has been increasingly investigated, resulting in the Reference Architecture research area. In spite of the positive impact of this type of architecture on reuse and productivity, the use of existing domain-specific reference architectures as basis of SPL has not been widely explored. The main contribution of this paper is to present how and when elements contained in existing reference architectures could contribute to the building of SPL artifacts during development of an SPL. We have observed that, in fact, reference architectures could make an important contribution to improving reuse and productivity, which are also important concerns in SPL.