Adding Aspects to xADL 2.0 for Software Product Line Architectures

The Feature–Oriented approach provides a way of modelling commonalities and variabilities among products of a software product line. A feature model can be used as input for generating an architectural representation of a product line. Product line architectures can be specified using one of the architecture description languages that already supports the specification of commonalities and variabilities. xADL 2.0 is a highly-extensible XMLbased architecture description language that allows product lines architectures to be defined. But, in the process of generating the architecture from a feature model, several crosscutting variables features and dependencies between features are commonly found from a feature-oriented analysis. These features and dependencies can be modeled using an aspect-oriented architecture approach. In this paper we present how a xADL 2.0 extension with aspects can help represent the crosscutting variables features and the dependencies in product line architectures from a feature-oriented