Towards managing variability across business component development

Reusing components, which are specifically set up to suit enterprises requirements, becomes a key element of their software engineering strategy. Consequently, the ability of reusable components to be varied and appropriate to different re-users requirements is a key property in reusable component development. From this need, the concept of variability has emerged. It is defined as the ability of a software artefact to be changed or customized to be used in multiple contexts. The objective of our research is to outline variability issues through reusable component development, and in particular, in the requirements phase of a Business Component (BC) development. The main ideas of this research are (a) to address variability issues through the requirements phase of a BC development and (b) to propose a metamodel to describe variability concepts that must be classified and designed to manage this variability.