Long-Term Product Line Sustainability with Planned Staged Investments

Software product lines (SPL) are long-living systems that enable systematic reuse in application engineering. Product-specific changes over time can result in architecture drift, which requires updating assumptions made in the SPL´s reuse infrastructure. A model called planned staged investments supports SPL rearchitecting in a sustainable way. The key idea is to use two different operational phases--investment and harvesting--to coordinate the competing, parallel needs of redesign and reuse.