Feature driven maintenance of product line architectures

Software product lines are long life software systems. Their maintenance requires stable system architectures, which have to be adapted to system domain changes over the years. In the most cases the integration of new and changed requirements into software architectures leads to decreasing of the quality properties of the architectures. In order to avoid an architecture decay a refactoring is required. Comprehensive refactorings are risky and expensive. In this paper is described an approach that proposes to integrate early architecture changes and low risk small refactoring steps into the software systems life cycle. The refactoring steps aim a continuous adaptation of product line architectures for new and expected domain requirements. The approach contains feature based requirements engineering and feature driven architecture refactoring activities.