Software development on the context of domain of application (domain focussed software development) may be seen as evolutionary development were software representing core domain concepts are extended/adapted to meet new product requirements. On such a context, managing the evolution of existing software is key to keep development costs under control. An evolution oriented domain engineering including a domain analysis phase with special focus on the identification/prediction and characterization of the variability, provides a framework to successfully master the evolution of software.
This paper summarizes some of the results carried out on the context of the European Research project PROTEUS (ESPRIT project 6086), together with some practical results from the software reuse program at the Hewlett Packard Grenoble Networks Division.
Keywords: Domain, variant, invariant, impact analysis, evolutiveness,
adaptive, cohesiveness with respect to variability, model predictability, model
coverage, taxonomy of variability, specialization attribute, factors of
variability.