A reuse triplet view of UML

We explore the extent to which the UML as a modelling language supports systematic software reuse (SSR), via the reuse triplet concept. We express systematic software reuse as a triple in the following way: SSR=(RSA, plugging, RSCs). We present a style for the representation of the reuse triplet's RSA (reuse software architecture) in the UML. We are looking for a representation technique that is suitable for expressing software architecture as a reusable interconnection of components. We decouple the invariant part of the RSA (the interconnection of components) from the variant part (the components being interconnected) and make the RSA more easily reusable through the plugging operation. The plugging component of the reuse triplet is the reuse operator for RSA instantiation, within the RSA's representation. We briefly examine how plugging fits into the framework provided by the UML to provide an instantiation of the RSA into a system in which the variant slots in the RSA are replaced by their realisations, which we call RSCs (reuse software components). We find that although there are problems with plugging as defined in the reuse triplet, the UML does offer a modeling capability that is not altogether unfriendly to our reuse triplet concept. This is good news for architecture-based systematic software reuse.