Composition of applications based on software product lines using architecture fragments and component sets

Software product lines (SPL) are a popular concept to represent commonalities and variability among a family of software systems. In many approaches to SPL engineering, feature modelling is used to specify which common and different features instances of an SPL can have. By mapping features to components realising that feature, the software architecture of the SPL instance can be derived from the features it requires. However, many approaches to feature modelling and mapping to implementation ignore the fact that features are often not implemented by a single component alone but by a set of components combined in a specific way. Moreover, they are often unable to capture implementation alternatives for features. In this paper, we motivate the need for a more extensive way of mapping features to alternatives of architecture fragments by an illustrative example. We discuss the challenges of composing a software architecture out of architecture fragments and outline a solution approach.