An Architecture Process Maturity Model of Software Product Line Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a maturity model for evaluating the development process of software product line architectures, using questionnaires and case studies to assess organizational maturity levels.

Contribution

It presents a novel architecture process maturity model specifically designed for software product line engineering, including assessment tools and validation through case studies.

Findings

Assessment questionnaires effectively measure process maturity.

Case studies demonstrate varying maturity levels in organizations.

Model provides a structured approach for process improvement.

Abstract

Software architecture has been a key research area in the software engineering community due to its significant role in creating high quality software. The trend of developing product lines rather than single products has made the software product line a viable option in the industry. Software product line architecture is regarded as one of the crucial components in the product lines, since all of the resulting products share this common architecture. The increased popularity of software product lines demands a process maturity evaluation methodology. Consequently, this paper presents an architecture process maturity model for software product line engineering to evaluate the current maturity of the product line architecture development process in an organization. Assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology comprise the framework of this model. The objective of the questionnaires is to collect information about the software product line architecture development process. Thus, in general this work contributes towards the establishment of a comprehensive and unified strategy for the process maturity evaluation of software product line engineering. Furthermore, we conducted two case studies and reported the assessment results, which show the maturity of the architecture development process in two organizations