On the Proactive Design of Product-Line Architectures with Aspects: An Exploratory Study

A product-line architecture (PLA) entails a design reused by a family of products sharing several features. The long-term stability of a PLA largely depends on the modularization of each feature from the design outset. As many features of a product-line crosscut the PLA decomposition, their modularity and stability are often improved with aspect-orientation according to recent studies. However, the use of this technique in proactive design of PLAs is challenging and has rarely been investigated. The problem is that information about the crosscutting nature of features is limited in this case. This paper presents a first study aimed at analyzing the feasibility of deriving stable aspect-oriented PLAs through a proactive design method. Our study relies on a product line and presents an in-depth exploratory analyse. We compare the stability of aspect-oriented and alternative candidates for proactively-designed PLAs. The results indicate that it is possible to derive aspect-oriented PLAs with superior stability based on a proactive design method. In addition, it is possible to anticipate pros and cons of PLAs with aspects when the latter are incorporated at an early design stage.