Leveraging Aspect-Connectors to Improve Stability of Product-Line Variabilities

One of the design goals of Product Line Architectures (PLAs) is to remain stable while accommodating changes of stakeholder’s requirements. However, the stability of a PLA is largely dependent on how modularized are the decisions crosscutting multiple architectural variation points. Their scattered implementation often leads to a number of side effects, such as architecture-wide modifications. This paper proposes a novel component model to encapsulate architectural variation points inside aspect-connectors, called Connector-VPs. Our component model addresses limitations of emerging aspect-oriented models, such as XPIs, which do not allow a modular implementation of crosscutting variability decisions in a PLA. The role of a Connector-VP is both binding aspectual-level components to base-level ones, and isolating crosscutting decisions at architectural variation points. We have evaluated the PLA stability designed using our solution in the presence of heterogeneous evolutionary scenarios in the context of component-based PLAs. The results show that our solution tends to promote superior PLA resilience on these scenarios.