Empirical Validation of Product-line Architecture Extensibility Metrics

The software product line (PL) approach has been applied as a successful software reuse technique for specific domains. The SPL architecture (PLA) is one of the most important SPL core assets as it is the abstraction of the products that can be generated, and it represents similarities and variabilities of a PL. Its quality attributes analysis and evaluation can serve as a basis for analyzing the managerial and economical values of a PL. This analysis can be quantitatively supported by metrics. Thus, we proposed metrics for the PLA extensibility quality attribute. This paper is concerned with the empirical validation of such metrics. As a result of the experimental work we can provide evidence that the proposed metrics serve as relevant indicators of extensibility of PLA by presenting a correlation analysis.