Overview of Generative Software Development

System family engineering seeks to exploit the commonalities among
systems from a given problem domain while managing the variabilities
among them in a systematic way. In system family engineering, new
system variants can be rapidly created based on a set of reusable
assets (such as a common architecture, components, models, etc.).
Generative software development aims at modeling and implementing
system families in such a way that a given system can be automatically
generated from a specification written in one or more textual or
graphical domain-specific languages. This paper gives an overview of
the basic concepts and ideas of generative software development
including DSLs, domain and application engineering, generative domain
models, networks of domains, and technology projections. The paper
also discusses the relationship of generative software development to
other emerging areas such as Model Driven Development and
Aspect-Oriented Software Development.