On the Need of Safe Software Product Line Architectures

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a family of related software systems distinguished by the different sets of features each system provides. Over the last decade, the substantial benefits of SPL practices have been extensively documented and corroborated both in academia and industry. Several architecture methods have been proposed that employ different artifacts for expressing the components of a SPL, their properties and relationships. Of crucial importance for any SPL architecture method is to guarantee that the variability, for instance as expressed in feature models, is not only preserved but also kept consistent across all artifacts used. In this research challenge paper we argue that Safe Composition - the guarantee that all programs of a product line are type safe - can be leveraged to address this guarantee for structural properties of SPL architectures and the challenges that that entails.