Extending ATAM to assess product line architecture

Software architecture is a core asset for any organization that develops software-intensive systems. Unsuitable architecture can precipitate disaster because the architecture determines the structure of the project. To prevent this, software architecture must be evaluated. The current evaluation methods, however, focus on single product architecture, and not product line architectures and they hardly consider the characteristics of the product lines, such as the variation points. This paper describes the extension of a scenario-based analysis technique for software product architecture-called EATAM, which not only analyzes the variation points of the quality attribute using feature modeling but also creates variability scenarios for the derivation of the variation points using the extended PLUC tag approach. This is a method that aims to consider the tradeoffs in the variability scenarios of the software product family architecture. The method has been validated through a case study involving microwave oven software product line in the appliance domain.