Introduction

Abstract

Many companies are looking for ways to minimise the costs of developing new products and to maximise sharing and reuse of software structure and components used in a product family. The ESPRIT IV project 20.477, ARES (Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Software), focuses on methods, techniques and tools to manage the diversity of products in a family at the level of software architecture. The charter of ARES is to find ways to help design reliable systems with embedded software that satisfy important quality requirements, evolve gracefully and may be built in-time and on-budget. ARES also addresses the problem of relating the features which differentiate the members of a product family to an architecture for that family. ARES aims to address the variance required by a product family at the architectural level and to map a feature selection to an instance of an architecture. Topics of interest also include specification of software architecture, architecture recovery, assessment of software architecture, and other subjects related to development and evolution of software architecture for product families. This project is a joint project between Nokia (prime contractor), Philips, ABB, Imperial College London, Technical University of Madrid and the Technical University of Vienna.