Modelling variability with features in distributed architectures

Abstract

Modelling the variable aspects of software architectures (SA) is key to develop product families (P-F) or product-lines (P-L). The difficulty to model this variability impacts the full life cycle of the product family, and specially its architecture. In addition, the physical view of architecture reflects most of the variability of the system. This work outlines the use of the concept of features for modelling the variable aspects in distributed systems. The goal we state here is to define the attributes needed to permit a description of system properties as well as quality-of-service (QoS) parameters, which can be applied to different parts of a distributed architecture. To do this we have extended the ideas and concepts of the FODA (Featured-Oriented Domain Analysis) features model to include numerical values able to represent the variability needed by software systems.