Models in software architecture derivation and evaluation challenges and opportunities

Product architecture derivation is a crucial activity in Software Product Line (SPL) development since an inadequate decision during the architecture design directly impacts the quality of the product under development. Deriving individual products from shared software assets is a time-consuming and expensive activity. Although some methods for architecture derivation and evaluation have been proposed over the past years, there are a number of challenging issues as to how we derive product architectures that meet the required quality attributes for the system. In this talk, I will overview the state-of-the-art in using models for architecture derivation and evaluation, will discuss the challenges faced in deriving and evaluating product architectures and the benefits that can be gained from the use of a multimodel (i.e., a set of interrelated models that represents different viewpoints of a particular system) that allows the software engineer to analyze the impact of different design choices or software architectures before they are reified into runnable code.