Generative Programming (GP) is an approach to software development that attempts to solve the types of problems that occur in real-world software projects. The focus of generative programming is to bring assembly line techniques to software development. Instead of directly developing a custom application by hand the system should be manufactured.

The key difference to more traditional approaches is that instead of focusing on building one specific application, we take a step back to think about building a family of systems. This gives us a solid basis for handling the “similar but not exactly the same” problem that we find so often in software development.

Generative programming provides tools and techniques to model system families of software. We can then build software components such that we can generate on demand the specific, highly customized and optimised end products (software systems) that meet our specific business and technical requirements.