Comparison of software product line architecture design methods: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA

Product line architectures (PLAs) have been under continuous attention in the software research community during the past few years. Although several methods have been established to create PLAs there are not available studies comparing PLA methods. Five methods are known to answer the needs of software product lines: COPA, FAST, FORM, KobrA and QADA. In this paper, an evaluation framework is introduced for comparing PLA design methods. The framework considers the methods from the points of view of method context, user, structure and validation. Comparison revealed distinguishable ideologies between the methods. Therefore, methods do not overlap even though they all are PLA design methods. All the methods have been validated on various domains. The most common domains are telecommunication infrastructure and information domains. Some of the methods apply software standards; at least OMG´s MDA for method structures, UML for language and IEEE Std-1471-2000 for viewpoint definitions.