Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product-Line Approach

-- Designing software architectures that maximize reuse and flexibility.-- Leveraging software architectures across product lines and families.-- Includes detailed, real-world case studies. Sophisticated development organizations worldwide are discovering the advantages of software architectures in building systems that deliver higher quality, lower development and maintenance costs, and shorter time to market. In this book, one of the field's leading experts addresses the two most important factors in making software architectures work: effective design, and leveraging architectures across product lines. Jan Bosch begins by outlining the rationale for software architectures, and reviewing the limits of traditional approaches to software reuse. Next, Bosch introduces a comprehensive approach to software architecture design that includes explicit quality goals, is carefully optimized up front, and still accounts for the inevitability of change. In Part II, Bosch presents today's best practices for defining architectures that can be reused across entire 'lines' or 'families' of software. Bosch covers each phase of the software product line lifecycle, including development, usage, and evolution of software assets, showing how to manage interdependencies, and cope with new requirements that were not part of the original design. The book includes several running case studies from real companies that have achieved competitive advantage through software architecture.