The essence of any modeling approach for product line architectures lies in its ability to express variability. Existing approaches do so by explicitly specifying variation points inside the architectural specification of the entire product line, usually with optional and alternative elements of some form. This, however, leads to a sizable mismatch between conceptual variability (i.e., the features through which architects logically view and interpret differences in product architectures) and actual variability (i.e., the modeling constructs through which the logical differences must be expressed). We contribute a new product line architecture modeling approach that unites the two. Our approach uses change sets to group related architectural differences and relationships to govern which change set combinations are valid when composed into a particular product architecture. The result lifts modeling of variability out of modeling architectural structure, consolidates related variation points, and explicitly and separately manages their compatibilities.

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We will demonstrate ArchStudio, an environment for software architecture modeling and meta-modeling. We will also showcase a set of innovative architecturecentric applications that use ArchStudio technologies as their basis.

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This paper addresses issues involved when an architect explore alternative designs including non-functional requirements; in our approach, non-functional requirements are expressed as statecharts. Non-functional requirements greatly impact the resulting design of a system because they naturally conflict with each other, crosscut the system at multiple points, and may be satisfied in a number of different ways. This makes correctly designing them early in the software lifecycle critical, since correcting them later can be extremely costly. Our approach supports an architect generating and evaluating many different design alternatives. This explorative process is not well supported by current techniques, which focus on documenting the result of this process, but not on assisting the designer during this process. We present an architecture-based approach that supports exploration of non-functional requirements expressed as statecharts. Our approach captures design alternatives of non-functional requirements separately, composes different system designs from these alternatives using a novel weaving technique, and analyzes the resulting design for specific qualities using simulation.