In the context of software product-lines the configuration knowledge describing how requirements are mapped onto elements of the reuse framework is essential for the success of the product-line. The starting point of this mapping process can be a feature model which describes the functionality to be found in the domain on an abstract level. In this paper we present an approach for the description of feature models which offers a tool-supported selection of features and a connection of this information to the further steps of application development. 1Introduction The highly competitive and dynamic field of software development implies the need to continuously increase the efficiency of development processes. Software reuse and especially the principle of product-lines are commonly recognized approaches to address this problem. The product -line process can thereby be seen as a two-staged process. In the first stage during domain engineering the product-line is initialized by the defi...

Abstract. In this article we elaborate on portability in componentbased operating systems, focusing in the hardware mediator construct proposed by Frhlich in the Application-Oriented System Design method. Differently from hardware abstraction layers and virtual machines, hardware mediators have the ability to establish an interface contract between the hardware and the operating system components and yet incur in very little overhead. The use of hardware mediators in the Epos system corroborates the portability claims associated to the techniques explained in this article, for it enabled Epos to be easily ported across very distinct architectures, such as the H8 and the IA-32, without any modification in its software components. 1

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 h...

This paper presents an alternative to achieve automatic run-time system generation based on the Application Oriented Systems Design method. Our approach relies on a static configuration mechanism that allows the generation of optimized versions of the operating system for each of the applications that are going to use it. This strategy is of great value in the domain of high performance computing since it results in performance gains and resource usage optimization.

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. Besides sketching our approach to component -based system development, this paper shows how Design Spaces can be applied to actively support reuseoriented activities. Design Spaces allow to uniformly describe requirements on and properties of software artefacts, as well as correlations between specific properties. As a consequence, they are well suited to guide the requirements capturing towards the properties of existing components, and to map those requirements to component selections and configurations. The paper demonstrates how to consistently deploy the Design Space technique throughout the process, leading to a complete and strongly tool-supported path from requirements capturing to system imple...

Software reuse and especially the paradigm of software components are promising approaches to increase the efficiency of software development.