In software product line engineering, the design of assets for reuse and the derivation of software products involves low-level and high-level decision making. In this process, two major types of decisions must be addressed: variability decisions, i.e., decisions made as part of variability management, and architectural decisions, i.e., fundamental decisions to be made during the design of the architecture of the product line or the products. In practice, variability decisions often overlap with or influence architectural decisions. For instance, resolving a variability may enable or prevent some architectural options. This inherent interdependence has not been explicitly and systematically targeted in the literature, and therefore, is mainly resolved in an ad hoc and informal manner today. In this paper, we discuss possible ways how variability and architectural decisions interact, as well as their management and integration in a systematic manner. We demonstrate the integration between the two types of decisions in a motivating case and leverage existing tools for implementing our proposal.

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