Variability Design and Customization Mechanisms for COTS Components

Component-Based Development (CBD) is gaining popularity as an effective reuse technology. Components in CBD are mainly for interorganizational reuse, rather than intra-organizational reuse [1]. One of the common forms of reusing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components is to acquire and customize them for each application. Therefore, components must be developed with consideration of commonality and variability in a domain in order to increase the reusability and applicability [2]. One effective factor in determining the quality of components is how precisely the variability is modeled and how effective customization mechanisms are provided. COTS components often come in binary and blackbox form, therefore modifying the source code or re-linking object code with library are forbidden. However, much of current approaches to component customization are directed towards tailoring whitebox components, i.e. source code is modified. In this paper, we present a comprehensive set of techniques to realize variability into blackbox components and to provide effective interface-based customization mechanisms. Maintanbility, applicability and reusability can be enhanced by using the mechanism.