Issues in mapping change-based product line architectures to configuration management systems

Most software product lines are first specified as an architecture, a high-level description of what the overall family system structure is to be like and from which individual product architectures can be generated. This structure, however, must be mapped onto implementation code stored in a Software Configuration Management system for it to be useful beyond the definitional phase of product line development. Various solutions have been developed to date, but the recent emergence of changebased approaches to product line architecture description challenges these existing solutions. In this paper, we characterize those challenges, and present an alternative solution that relies on a mapping to a change-based Software Configuration Management system. We motivate this choice, discuss why it is more appropriate, and carefully lay out its strengths and weaknesses relative to the existing state of the art.