Mapping Features to Architectural Components in Aspect-Oriented Software Product Lines

Software product lines (SPLs) based development aims at saving development cost as well as reducing time-to-market by structured reuse of base assets for a group of similar products. Requirements of a product line are organized into features in feature-oriented analysis (FOA) approach. Commonalities and variabilities among products in a product line are showed in the features. The effectiveness of a SPL approach depends on how well features variabilities are implemented and managed. Because there is cross-cutting among the features, it is difficult to implement these features into architectural components. In recent years some papers introduced aspect-oriented techniques into SPLs to modularized the variable features. In this paper we describe the role of aspects in software product lines. According to the role of aspects, we classify the features and propose a process to map features to architectural components in an aspect-oriented product line engineering (AOPLE).