International Workshop on
Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families

Scope: 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 primary focus of this workshop was on methods, techniques and tools to manage the diversity of products in a family at the level of software architecture. Topics of interest also included specification of software architecture, architecture recovery, assessment of software architecture, and other subjects related to development and evolution of software architecture for product families.

Organisers: This workshop was organised by the ESPRIT IV project no. 20.477, ARES (Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Software). ARES is a joint project between Philips, Nokia, ABB, London Imperial College, Technical University of Vienna and Polytechnical University of Madrid. The main objective is to enable the software developers to explicitly describe, assess and manage architectures of embedded software families. The intended results of ARES will help to 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. The current state-of-the-art addresses variance at the code-level whereas 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.

Proceedings : (only documents whose permissions to be published here have been obtained are included ; new documents will be included if permissions obtained; documents are provided as given by their authors  in Word, Postscript or text files)