A Study On Some Key Techniques To Support Software Reuse In Product Line Architecture

Since Fritz Bauer put forward the concept of "software crisis" in 1968, software industries have been troubled by problems of low production efficiency, low product quality, high production cost and long development cycle. With the development of software industries, people in both industry and academy pay more attention on software reuse. They attempted to solve the software crisis by reusing the high quality software modules to construct software systems. From subroutines in the 1960s through modules in the 1970s, objects in the 1980s, and components in the 1990s, the reusability of software has been steadily improved. In particular, techniques of component-based software development (CBSD) and Product-Line Engineering (PLE) have been developed rapidly in the last ten years, which also speed up the development of software reusability.However, the implemental and experimental results demonstrate that many problems still exist in software reuse, especially in the domain-specific applications. For example, how to identify and reuse the common assets, how to trade off the universality of all the domains and individuality of a specific domain, how to organize software assets on different granularity levels to improve the flexibility of reuse and reduce the complexity of reuse, how to manage the huge reuse assets base and be able to serve the domain-specific software development, how to reuse the software assets from the third party and avoid the semantic ambiguity. All above problems are important for both industry and academy.In order to solve above problems, this thesis analyze and compare the different software reuse technologies, including Object-Oriented software reuse, CBSD software reuse and PLE software reuse and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies. This thesis also proposes a layered reuse architecture in product line and deeply study some key techniques to support software reuse in product line architecture. Our contributions include:(1) In order to effectively apply the software reuse technologies and clearly present the complicated relationships among software assets on different granularity levels, we propose a layered reuse architecture in product line, consisting of the product layer, product line architecture layer, framework layer, special component repository (SCR) layer, and distributed component repository (DCR)...