Composing product families from reusable components

At Philips Kommunikations Industrie, a building block development method is used in the construction of telecommunication infrastructure systems. This architectural method has been optimised for the construction of product families. Building blocks are the components of which the software is build. They resemble hardware components by being pre-manufactured components. The building blocks reside in a 'construction set'. The family architecture is based upon a skeleton of generic building blocks. These building blocks are present in (almost) all systems in the family. Different configurations can be obtained by selecting the appropriated application building blocks from the construction set. This paper describes the notions of generic and application building blocks and their use for product families.