Component-Based Product Line Development: The KobrA Approach

Abstract

The product line and component-based approaches to software engineering both hold the potential to significantly increase the level of reuse in industrial software development and maintenance. They also have complementary strengths, since they address the problem of reuse at opposite ends of the granularity spectrum -product line development essentially supports "reuse in the large" while compo-nent based development supports "reuse in the small". This paper describes a method, KobrA, which cleanly integrates the two paradigms into a systematic, unified approach to software development and maintenance. Key synergies resulting from this integration include support for the rapid and flexible instantia-tion of system variants, and the provision of methodological support for compo-nent-based framework development.