The use of product lines in industrial software development is steadily gaining acceptance, especially since their disciplined use can lead to reduced development costs and time. The use of a product line carefully coordinates the design, development, and evolution of a set of intimately related products. Product line architectures create a paradigm shift from component reuse to architecture reuse. The effective use of of a product line architecture requires an environment to manage its evolving structure, an area of research that has been largely ignored to date. Ménage is specifically designed to fill this void.

Ménage is an environment for managing evolving product line architectures. Ménage builds upon our existing representation for software architecture, namely xADL 2.0 (pronounced "zay-dal"), to provide three capabilities that are directly geared towards managing and evolving product line architectures.

1. Ménage supports the definition of a product line architecture as a set of core architectural elements that is extended with variation points. Variation points are the optional and variant elements with which individual product architectures can be distinguished from each other.
2. Ménage explicitly tracks the evolution of all individual architectural elements as well as the overall product line architecture with a versioning mechanism that automatically creates a history of all changes.
3. Ménage provides a mechanism to select one or more product line architectures out of an overall product line architecture by applying user-specific criteria.