Component-based product-line engineering with the UML

The software industry is pinning its hopes for future reuse and productivity gains on component-based software development. However, to date the component paradigm has only really penetrated the implementation and deployment phases of the software life-cycle, and does not yet play a major role in the earlier analysis and design activities of large software projects. This is evidenced by the fact that in today's technology being a "component" usually means being implemented as a JavaBeans, a COM object or a COBRA application. This tutorial will present a new method for component-based software engineering, known as KobrA, which supports a higher-level, model-driven representation of components and thus enables the benefits of components to be realized throughout the software life-cycle. The method thus provides a component-oriented way of developing model driven architectures (MDA)