Towards a process to design product line architectures based on reference architectures

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. From another perspective, a special type of architecture that contains knowledge about a specific domain has been increasingly investigated, resulting in the research area of Reference Architecture. In spite of the positive impact of this type of architecture on reuse and productivity, the use of the knowledge contained in existing reference architectures in order to develop SPL has not been widely explored yet. The main contribution of this paper is to present a process, named ProSA-RA2PLA, that systematizes the use of reference architectures for building product line architectures. To illustrate the application of this process, we have built a product line architecture for an SPL of software testing tools using a reference architecture of that domain. Based on initial results, we have observed that benefits can be achieved, mainly regarding improvement in reuse and productivity to develop SPL.