Abstract
In many respects it is easier to formulate an architecture for a family of products if one assumes that the systems are being developed from scratch. But the vast majority of systems development efforts today start from a cornucopia of legacy systems. Significant progress in component-based architecture, system understanding, object-technology, and net-centric computing now makes it possible to evolve these legacy systems to a state in which they exhibit many of the characteristics of product lines. Systems in well-established domains are migrating to distributed object systems that exhibit large-scale reuse from a core set of assets while keeping the legacy systems largely intact. Many of these systems have evolved without overtly using product line terminology or practices and have been off the radar screen of the product line community as a starting point for product families. The advocates of product lines need to recognize this “distributed legacy evolution model” as an integral part of their practices for developing information systems.
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Weiderman, N., Bergey, J., Smith, D., Tilley, S. (1998). Can Legacy Systems Beget Product Lines?. In: van der Linden, F. (eds) Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families. ARES 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-68383-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-68383-6_18
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