Software Reuse in Product Populations

Consumer products are becoming increasingly software intensive. The software complexity of individual products grows, while the diversity of products increases and the lead time must decrease. Software reuse is the answer to this, not only within a family but also between families of consumer products. We have devised an approach based upon a software component technology to enable reuse. This paper describes that approach, and it zooms in on two important aspects of component-based development. One aspect concerns the prediction of system properties from properties of components, which we illustrate using thread synchronization as example. The other aspect concerns branching of our software in our configuration management systems, where our analysis leads to the discovery that we may be constantly rewriting our own code and to the definition of the turn-over factor to quantify this. We end this paper with a brief validation of our approach.