Generic Implementation of Product Line Components

An argument pro component-based software development is the idea of constructing software systems by assembling preexisting components instead of redeveloping similar or identical functionality always from scratch. Unfortunately, integrating existing components practically means adaptation and use rather than use only, which makes an ideal component-based development hard to realize in practice. Product line engineering, however, tackles this problem by making components as generic as needed for a particular product family and thus allows component reuse. Such a component covers variabilities and thus its implementation must consider variabilities as well. In this paper, we describe a process for implementing generic product line components and give an overview of variability mechanisms at the implementation level, illustrated by a running example, a generic test component.