A Systematic Review on Metamodels to Support Product Line Architecture Design

Product Line Architecture (PLA) design is a key activity for developing successful Software Product Line (SPL) projects. PLA design is a difficult task, mostly due to the complexity of the software systems that SPLs deal with, and their variabilities. Metamodels have been used to support the representation of assets that compose a PLA, SPL variability and the relationships among them. The goal of this study is to characterize the use of metamodeling on PLA design, aiming to identify the main characteristics of metamodels, the elements used for PLA and variability representation and trace the evolution of metamodels. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify the primary studies on the use of metamodels in PLA Design. Thirty-five studies that proposed metamodels to support PLA design were selected. The review main findings are: (i) it is difficult to identify the existence of research trends because the number of publication varies and metamodels lack standardization; (ii) several metamodels support feature representation; (iii) the majority of studies addressed variability representation with variation points in UML diagrams; and, (iv) five evolution lines that describe how metamodels evolved over the years were identified.