Model-driven component-based product line engineering. A natural synergy

Component-based software development promises to bring numerous benefits to the software industry, including reduced development costs and times, improved quality, and lower risk. However, some significant technical and commercial obstacles need to be overcome before these benefits are widely realized in practice. In particular, component-orientation needs to pervade the full software life-cycle, rather than be concentrated in the implementation and deployment phases as at present, and component-based development methods need to provide effective heuristics for gauging and optimizing component reusability, rather than simply assume software modules are inherently reusable merely because they are packaged as components. In this position paper we argue that the best way to achieve these aims is to integrate the principles of component-based development (CBD) with the model driven architecture (MDA) and product line engineering (PLE) paradigms, and briefly describe how this is achieved in the KobrA method.