A Multimodeling Approach for Quality-Driven Architecture Derivation

Product architecture derivation is a crucial activity in software product line (SPL) development since an inadequate decision during the architecture design directly impacts the quality of the product under development. Although some methods for architecture derivation have been proposed in the last few years, there is still a need for approaches that model the impact among architectural design decisions and quality attributes and use this information to drive the derivation of high-quality product architectures. In this paper, we present an approach for integrating quality attributes in early stages of the SPL lifecycle. The approach is based on a multimodel that explicitly represents the product line from multiple viewpoints (e.g., variability, functional, and quality) and the relationships among them, as well as on a derivation process that makes use of this multimodel to derive a product architecture with the required quality attributes from the product line architecture. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated using a case study on the automotive domain.