Excerpt - 1

The problem with current software engineering is that we usually end up with a concrete software system, but don't know how we got there. Most of the design knowledge is lost, and this makes software maintenance and evolution very difficult and costly to perform. In Generative Programming, we strive to capture as much of the production knowledge in program form as possible. The production knowledge includes not only the configuration knowledge, but also measurement instrumentation, testing strategies and plans, error diagnosis, debugging support, program visualization, and so on. These various aspects are domain specific and are packaged in reusable libraries, which we refer to as active libraries [CEG+98].

Excerpt from ``Generative Programming", page 6.