Evolving Industrial Software Architectures into a Software Product Line: A Case Study

Industrial software applications have high requirements on performance, availability, and maintainability. Additionally, diverse application landscapes of large corporate companies require systematic planning for reuse, which can be fostered by a software product-line approach. Analyses at the software architecture level can help improving the structure of the systems to account for extra-functional requirements and reuse. This paper reports a case study of product-line development for ABB's robotics PC software. We analysed the software architectures of three existing robotics applications and identified their core assets. As a result, we designed a new product-line architecture, which targets at fulfilling various extra-functional requirements. This paper describes experiences and lessons learned during the project.