The software product line architecture: An empirical investigation of key process activities

Software architecture has been a key area of concern in software industry due to its profound impact on the productivity and quality of software products. This is even more crucial in case of software product line, because it deals with the development of a line of products sharing common architecture and having controlled variability. The main contributions of this paper is to increase the understanding of the influence of key software product line architecture process activities on the overall performance of software product line by conducting a comprehensive empirical investigation covering a broad range of organizations currently involved in the business of software product lines. This is the first study to empirically investigate and demonstrate the relationships between some of the software product line architecture process activities and the overall software product line performance of an organization at the best of our knowledge. The results of this investigation provide empirical evidence that software product line architecture process activities play a significant role in successfully developing and managing a software product line.