Evolving a Software Products Line for E-commerce Systems

Software Product Lines engineering is a technique that explores systematic reuse of software artifacts in large scale to implement applications that share a common domain and have some customized features. For improving Product Line Architecture evolution, it is advisable to develop Software Product Lines using a modular structure. This demand can be satisfied by an aspect-oriented and component-based feature-architecture method that integrates components, aspects and variation point aspect-connectors. This approach allows minimization of feature scattering in the architectural model and supports modular modelling of crosscutting features. A case study mapping major features of significant e-commerce systems operating in Brazil and other countries was performed to evaluate this approach. The assessment of our solution was performed comparing its stability and modularity with other two approaches. Our results indicate that change impact in the architectural model is reduced when using our solution in the context of Software Product Lines evolution.