A lightweight language for software product lines architecture description

Abstract

The architecture description of a software product line (SPL) is essential to make it clear how the architecture realizes the feature model and to represent both the domain and application engineering architectural artefacts. However, most architecture description languages (ADLs) for SPL have limited support regarding variability management and they do not express the relationship between features and the architecture, besides the lack of tools for graphical and textual modelling and a non-clear separation between the domain and application engineering activities. In order to overcome these deficiencies, this paper presents LightPL-ACME, an ADL whose main goal is to be a simple, lightweight language for the SPL architecture description, and enable the association between the architectural specification and the artefacts involved in the SPL development process, including the relationship with the feature model and the representation of both domain and application engineering elements. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.