Maturing Architectures and Components in Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software product lines have received considerable adoption in the software industry and prove to be a very successful approach to intra-organizational software reuse. Existing literature, however, often assumes a singular transition from independent product development to a software product line approach. In this chapter, we present an overview of different approaches to architecture-centric, intra-organizational reuse of software architectures and components and organize these in maturity levels. In addition, we present the notion of hierarchical scopes in software development organizations where different scopes may have achieved different maturity levels. The claim of this chapter is that the challenge that most organizations face is not the singular adoption of a software product line, but rather the continuous maturation of the organization in terms of exploiting intra-organizational reuse at multiple levels of scope in the organization.