Architecture recovery for product families

Software product families are rarely created right away but they emerge when a domain becomes mature enough to sustain their long-term investments. The typical pattern is to start with a small set of products to quickly enter a new market. As soon as the business proves to be successful new investments are directed to consolidating the software assets. The various products are migrated towards a flexible platform where the assets are shared and new products can be derived from. In order to create and maintain the platform, the organization needs to carry out several activities such as recovering the architectures of single products and product families, designing the reference architecture, isolating the variable parts, and generalizing software components. In this paper, we introduce a product family construction process that exploits related systems and product families, and we describe methods and tools used. We also present an approach for classifying platforms according to platform coverage and variation and describe three techniques to handle variability across single products and whole product families.