Designing a Product Family's Software Architecture, Components and Development Tools

摘要

A product family is a set of applications that share a collection of features satisfying a particular problem domain's needs, and are developed from a common set of assets in a prescribed way. Benefits like cost reduction, decreased time-to-market, and quality improvement result from employing the product family approach in application development. However, this requires having available a complete software infrastructure, the assets, that is not easy to implement. Based on the author's experience working on a project aimed at improving the development of a class of decision-support systems, this paper describes an up-to-date design method to initiate a product family approach. The method combines usage-centered design, use cases and a software architecture design process to propose 6 steps to designing the software architecture, a set of reusable componentes and a set of development tools required for the efficient implementation of a product family.