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broad sense, are important artifacts in such types of software
chains.Manuallywrittencodeshould,andcould,beintegrated.
Still, interfaces are needed to materialize the contract the
programmer has to satisfy during code design.
The notion of views or points of view has been used
for a long time in software engineering and is also used
in MD-SPL engineering. The development of a complex
system needs several stakeholders - requirements analysts,
architects, designers, programmers, who are concerned
with several different aspects of the software system
(requirements, architectures, GUI, persistence, concurrency,
security, distribution, etc.). The viewpoints of a software are
multiple, and for instance, several approaches have been
defined to tackle this issue in OOP [SHI 89, CAR 90].
A reference work for the use of views in architecture
is [KRU 95], which distinguishes four views, namely the
logical, process, physical, and development views. In SPLE,
we deal with traditional views and some new ones. We
will use feature models and/or models for variability,
a reference architecture, product architectures, component
views, technical, or implementation platform information, the
production plan, etc. A general software process should start
fromrequirementsandleadtosourcecodeandtestingartifacts.
We will present our general view, which is consistent with the
one above, but we have not considered requirements analysis.
Our process assumes that some requirements are met by
feature models and other kinds of models. For a reference that
provides a view and tools for requirements analysis in SPLE,
the reader could consider [RAS 00]. In the next chapter, we
will extend our product line chain to cope with the specific
issue of fine-grained variability and configuration. Considering
the need for several views, which cannot always be completely
orthogonal, models provide a uniform way to represent these
various aspects and also the constraints between them. Model
weaving and model transformations are the computation
processes enabling us to combine these views and to build
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