Compositionality in Software Platforms

Software product lines or platforms have received attention in research, but especially in industry. Many companies have moved away from developing software from scratch for each product and instead focused on the commonalities between the different products and capturing those in a product line architecture and an associated set of reusable assets. This development is, especially in the embedded systems industry, a logical development since software is an increasingly large part of products and often defines the competitive advantage. When moving from a marginal to a major part of products, the required effort for software development also becomes a major issue and industry searches for ways to increase reuse of existing software to minimize product-specific development and to increase the quality of software. A number of authors have reported on industrial experiences with product line architectures. Early work on goes back to the late 90ies [Bass et al. 97, Macala et al. 96, Dikel et al. 97] and the field has since then developed in new directions to extend the applicability of the concept.