Software Factory Schema: Architecture

Summary

The Software Factory architecture described in this chapter is part of the Software Factory schema and will provide the basis for the Software Factory template. We discussed two very important concepts in this chapter. First, we talked about product line architectures, which support variants of products through variability mechanisms. Second, we talked about how we can describe architectures in a systematic way using views that conform to well-defined viewpoints. The Software Factory schema incorporates both concepts and therefore, among other things, provides the means to document the architecture of products developed using the Software Factory.

Our focus was to showcase modeling techniques, editors, and tools that not only create pretty diagrams, but at the same time create implementation-in other words, living documentation (taken from the ISpySoft prototypical application). When the underlying implementation changes, living documentation should not disconnect from it. However, please keep in mind that nondiagrammatic views (e.g., a set of source code files) are just as valid and due to the lack of “good-enough” modeling tools will make up the major share of the views created for product line members in most factories.

Even though different product lines will have different sets of viewpoints, we are convinced that product lines in similar domains will have similar, overlapping sets of viewpoints (e.g., smart client applications in different business domains). Hopefully in the future there will be libraries of commonly occurring viewpoints that can be used as the basis for rapidly building Software Factory schemas.