Plastic Partial Components: A solution to support variability in architectural components

Software product line engineering is becoming widely used due to the improvement it means when developing software products of the same family. The commonalities and variabilities of software product lines (SPL) are identified during the domain engineering process and then, they are realized in the software architecture. Therefore, mechanisms to explicitly specify the commonalities and variabilities of SPLs at the architectural level are required. Most of the current mechanisms specify variations on the architecture by adding or removing architectural elements. However, it is also necessary to specify variations inside components. In this paper, we propose the notion of plastic partial components to support internal variations. The specification of these components is performed using invasive software composition techniques and without tangling the core and product architectures of the SPL. This contribution is illustrated through a SPL for developing domain-specific validation environments.