The notion of product families is becoming more and more popular, both in research and in industry. Every product family initiative that is started within a company has its own context, such as a particular business strategy and a particular application domain. Each product family has its own specific characteristics that have to fit in with its context. In this paper we will describe two dimensions for classifying product families. The first dimension deals with the coverage of the product family platform. Platform coverage deals with the proportion of the functionality provided by the platform, and the additional functionality needed to derive a specific product within the product family. The second dimension deals with the variation mechanisms that are used to derive a specific product from the generic platform. The coverage of the platform and the variation mechanisms used are not totally unrelated. We will discuss various types of platform coverage and variation mechanisms, including their characteristics. These two dimensions are based on experience gained with a number of product families. We will look at four of these in greater detail to illustrate our ideas. We believe that these dimensions will aid the classification of product families. This will both facilitate the selection of a new product family approach for a particular context, and support the evaluation of existing product families. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In order to respond to changing requirements and advances in technology, system and software architectures must evolve during their lifetimes. Usually, in this evolution, several key components of the architecture are replaced. Achieving successful architecture evolution at a reasonable cost and effort is difficult. It requires many architectural and technological decisions. This paper describes an approach, called 3RDBA that facilitates replacing a key component in a long-living architecture. It is based on systematically gathering all information needed to make well-founded decisions regarding evolution of the architecture. The approach consists of an exploration, consolidation and migration cycle. Each cycle contains four steps: requirements, design, build and analyze. 3RDBA enables construction and evaluation of several alternative architecture realizations together with a migration path from the existing architecture towards the selected, new architecture. We describe how we have successfully applied this approach to support the evolution of a medical imaging system architecture.

In this paper, we describe our experience with component frameworks within a family architecture for a medical imaging product family. The component frameworks are handled as an integral part of the architectural approach and are an important means to support diversity in the functionality provided by the individual family members.This paper focuses on a particular kind of component framework that has been applied throughout the medical imaging product family. This kind of framework is useful when the various family members are based on the same concepts and the diversity is formed by the differences in the specific instances of these concepts that are present in the family members. These component frameworks have a number of similarities, allowing a standardised approach to their development. They support the division of the system into a generic architectural skeleton, which can be extended with plug-ins to realise specific family members, each with their own set of features.