Hello,

I'm the lead developer/architect wanna-be on a J2EE based system/platform at work that serves both real estate and automotive markets. The systems consists of a set of database back ends, web services and two web clients. The platform ends up serving 3 different products: an internal vehicle inventory system for use by company analysts, an external dealer management system (commercialized product), and a real estate inventory system (commercialized). In other words, it follows a software product lines approach....My question is, I'm having trouble communicating to other technical and some business people how this platform architecture is one system that serves multiple markets (by leveraging some existing assets combined with minor modifications)....Is there a formal modeling language that can simplify communicating this intent? I should note that I haven't read much about software product lines, so I'm not sure if there is actually a standard modeling approach to SPL that i'm not aware of....I'm also interested in knowing if there are special configuration management practices for such systems.

thanks,