Software architecture development for product line software

In 1995, an initiative was launched to assess the potential for reuse of operational flight program software across multiple fighter aircraft platforms, and to define and demonstrate a supporting system architecture based upon open commercial hardware, software, standards and practices. This initiative produced a set of reusable object oriented navigation software, which was flight tested on several different aircraft platforms hosted on different hardware configurations. The following year, this validation of the product line approach led to broader application of the techniques to the tactical aircraft mission processing domain. Key aspects of the component based logical architecture developed have been previously described. This paper traces the process used to develop the Software Architecture used for this project.