Increasing Software Quality through Design Reuse

The development of new applications based on existing design and code increases software quality, since tested assets are more likely to exhibit fewer errors than software developed from scratch. Modular and hierarchical software topologies promote reuse by allowing the development of applications based on independent software units that can be arbitrarily interconnected. In this paper we introduce a different dimension to software reuse based on topology. This kind of reuse is termed here by inheritance of topology and permits the use of existing software topologies to define new ones without incurring in the cost of creating designs from scratch. To illustrate this concept we employ Connectons, a software topology that combines a modular and hierarchical software definition with the request reply paradigm. In this paper we show that inheritance of topology promotes software quality and in particular we show that it provides a better support for reuse than the creational design patterns Factory Method and Abstract Factory.