Constraints for the design of variability-intensive service-oriented reference architectures – An industrial case study

REARM: A Reuse-Based Economic Model for Software Reference Architectures

“…One of these approaches is the use of software reference architectures (RA), which are becoming widely studied and adopted in research and practice [3] [19]. As defined by Bass et al [5], an RA is "a reference model mapped onto software elements (that cooperatively implement the functionality defined in the reference model) and the data flows between them".…”

“…However, out of the SPL context, RA and PLA are considered different types of artifacts [3][12] [19] [28]. In Fig.…”

“…PLAs are just one asset of SPL [9, p. 12].  RAs are more generic and abstract than PLAs that are more complete architectures [3] [19]. Hence, "RAs can be designed with an intended scope of a single organization or multiple organizations that share a certain property" [3] whereas PLAs are produced for a single organization [19].…”

“… RAs are more generic and abstract than PLAs that are more complete architectures [3] [19]. Hence, "RAs can be designed with an intended scope of a single organization or multiple organizations that share a certain property" [3] whereas PLAs are produced for a single organization [19].  RAs provide standardized solutions for a broader domain (i.e., "spectrum of systems in a technology or application domain" [19]) whereas PLAs provide standardized solutions for a smaller subset of the software systems of a domain [28] (i.e., "group of systems that are part of a product line" [19]).…”

“…Hence, "RAs can be designed with an intended scope of a single organization or multiple organizations that share a certain property" [3] whereas PLAs are produced for a single organization [19].  RAs provide standardized solutions for a broader domain (i.e., "spectrum of systems in a technology or application domain" [19]) whereas PLAs provide standardized solutions for a smaller subset of the software systems of a domain [28] (i.e., "group of systems that are part of a product line" [19]). Therefore, PLAs give a coherent and more congruent view of the products in a project (i.e., possible to track the status of) [12] whereas by means of RAs it is more difficult to obtain congruence [3], since they can only provide guidelines for applications' development.…”