Supporting Component-Based Software Development Using Domain Knowledge

摘要

A consistent implementation of component-based reuse bears several implications for the design of the software development process. For instance, requirements engineering has to be tailored to particularly elicit information necessary for selecting and configuring appropriate components. Concerning the development of components, a thorough analysis of the envisioned domain has to provide the necessary information about how specific requirements can be met. To this end, a domain model describes the commonalities and variabilities of possible solutions. While commonalities can be mapped directly to fixed implementations, this paper presents an approach to map requirements concerning the variabilities to concrete component configurations. Our approach is based on the technique of design spaces, which allows to both capture the variability of a domain and to formalize transformation rules leading from requirements to possible solutions. In the course of a detailed example, we demonstrate how the design space technique can be applied to provide tool support throughout the development process.