Introducing software reuse technology

Lucent Technologies' business needs for software development mandate rapid production based on careful engineering. One key method of achieving this goal is software reuse. Since 1995, the Software Engineering and Technology Group has supported a strategy of domain-specific engineering, with the underlying technology of application generators. From our successes and failures, we have learned that, to succeed, reuse — and new technology in general — needs, at the very least, grass-roots adopters, top-down management support, enabling technology, and, most importantly, integration of the new methods into the mainstream. This paper uses our experience with domain engineering to illustrate how to introduce new technology. We describe the motivations for development based on domains, our process for adopting technology, how we make domain engineering mainstream, and how the lessons we learned can be applied to help others introduce new technology.