Mining and managing software assets

Mining and managing software assets are important for strategic reuse of assets in new systems. This report outlines the SEI's Options Analysis for Reengineering (OAR) method, which is an approach for mining components and discusses component repositories and in particular the SEI's Knowledge-Based Automated Component Ensemble Evaluation (K-BACEE). OAR is a systematic, architecture-centric method for mining existing components for a product line or new software architecture. The method incorporates a set of scalable techniques and activities to collaboratively analyze existing components, determine viable mining options, and evaluate the most promising options. Once mined, software assets need to be managed to be useful. Compatibility with other legacy assets, commercial-off-the-shelf software products, and other software components needs to be understood and codified in such a way that it can be easily shared with other development projects within the organization. Towards this end, the SEI has developed K-BACEE which is a component repository that uses codified integration knowledge to assist system integrators in selecting ensembles of highly compatible components.