A product line approach needs to provide support for different roles such as product and project managers, business domain experts, or software architects. Using three examples from the domains of component-based development, plugin architectures, and services we show that linking business and technology views is success-critical.

We have developed the tool-supported approach DOPLER for modeling product lines that provides flexibility to be used in different environments such as component-based development, IEC 61499 function blocks, or plugin architectures. More recently, we started using DOPLER to support the definition and adaptation of service-oriented software systems and to provide different views for business people and engineers.

The service-oriented computing paradigm offers capabilities for designing flexible and evolvable systems. Despite many benefits adapting a service-oriented system to different environments and evolving requirements remains challenging. Several research groups have thus proposed the use of product line variability models to support the evolution of service-oriented systems. Together with UPC Barcelona we are currently developing extensions to the DOPLER tools that allow to define product line models of service-oriented system, to use the models to describe possible adaptations, to support service monitoring based on metrics, and to perform system adaptation based on monitoring information. Our approach supports different views for engineering and business domain experts.