Reusing software: issues and research directions
Mili, H.; Mili, F.; Mili, A.
Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Volume 21, Issue 6, Jun 1995 Page(s):528 - 562
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/32.391379
Summary:Software productivity has been steadily increasing over the past
30 years, but not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on
the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver;
nothing short of an order of magnitude increase in productivity will
extricate the software industry from its perennial crisis. Several
decades of intensive research in software engineering and artificial
intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only)
realistic approach to bring about the gains of productivity and quality
that the software industry needs. In this paper, we discuss the
implications of reuse on the production, with an emphasis on the
technical challenges. Software reuse involves building software that is
reusable by design and building with reusable software. Software reuse
includes reusing both the products of previous software projects and the
processes deployed to produce them, leading to a wide spectrum of reuse
approaches, from the building blocks (reusing products) approach, on one
hand, to the generative or reusable processor (reusing processes), on
the other. We discuss the implication of such approaches on the
organization, control, and method of software development and discuss
proposed models for their economic analysis. Software reuse benefits
from methodologies and tools to: (1) build more readily reusable
software and (2) locate, evaluate, and tailor reusable software, the
last being critical for the building blocks approach. Both sets of
issues are discussed in this paper, with a focus on application
generators and OO development for the first and a thorough discussion of
retrieval techniques for software components, component composition (or
bottom-up design), and transformational systems for the second. We
conclude by highlighting areas that, in our opinion, are worthy of
further investigation
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