An Annotation System for Component Specification in a Software Product Line

Abstract

Software Product Lines (SPL) development promotes reuse, improves quality and reduces development timesands costs. Using a component-based development approach to implement SPL services provides further reuse, improving flexibility for creating new SPLs and instantiating products from an existing one. However, the design and implementation of these components has a number of challenges that must be taken into consideration in order to ensure its effective reuse. In this paper, we propose an annotation system defined by a metadata model. Such system allows to specify the necessary information about the semantics of the services implemented by each component, technical requirements, and variability. This system is then applied to real software components from a previously developed SPL for the marine ecology domain.