Configuring Designs for Reuse

Abstract

The main problem in developing software product families is how to share effort and reuse parts of design and implementation while providing variation of features and capabilities in the products.We discuss the mechanisms that are commonly used to achieve reuse and sharing in product families, and the kind of variance each is best suited for.Our analysis motivates a need for a new mechanism to deal with ad hoc variation of features found in different members of a family.We argue that higher level abstraction and parametrization techniques are not well suited for this task.We propose an alternative approach that enables sufficiently detailed designs for every variant and at the same time achieves a level of design reuse without making designs unnecessarily complex or implementations inefficient.