An Architecture Process Maturity Model of Software Product Line Engineering
This addresses the problem of assessing and improving software product line architecture development processes for organizations in the software engineering domain, but it is incremental as it builds on existing maturity evaluation concepts.
The paper tackles the need for evaluating process maturity in software product line engineering by presenting an architecture process maturity model, including assessment questionnaires and a rating methodology, with case studies showing maturity results in two organizations.
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