Developing Product Lines with Third-Party Components

The trends toward product line development and toward adopting more third- party software are hard to combine. The reason is that product lines demand fine control over the software (e.g., for diversity management), while third- party software (almost by definition) provides only little or no control. A growing use of third-party software may therefore lead to less control over the product development process or, vice-versa, requiring large control over the software may limit the ability to use third-party components. Since both are means to reduce costs and to shorten time to market, the question is whether they can be combined effectively. In this paper, we describe our solution to this problem which combines the Koala component model developed within Philips with the concept of build-level components. We show that by lifting component granularity of Koala components from individual C files to build-level components, both trends can be united. The Koala architectural description language is used to orchestrate product composition and to manage diversity, while build-level components form the unit of third-party component composition.