Architecture Conformance Analysis Approach within the Context of Multiple Product Line Engineering

One of the important concerns in software product line engineering is the conformance of the application architecture to the product line architecture. Consistency with the product line architecture is important to ensure that the business rules and constraints that are defined for the entire product family are not violated. Usually, the conformance checking to the product line architecture is a manual and tedious process. A popular approach for ensuring architecture conformance is reflexion modeling which has been primarily used to check the consistency between the architecture and the code. In this paper we present an approach for product line conformance analysis based on reflexion modeling. We consider conformance analysis in product line engineering and extend our discussion to multiple product line engineering. Our study shows several important challenges regarding reflexion modeling within the context of product line engineering.