WIER-implementing artifact reuse in an educational environment with real projects-work in progress

Software reuse has been discussed in the literature for many years. As educators, the authors aim to foster the legitimate reuse of software artifacts such as specifications, designs, test cases, prototypes, documentation and templates. This paper describes a major project that attempts to encourage reuse in an undergraduate computing degree program by utilising these artifacts. The students are required to complete an industrial experience project as part of their course. Since 1995, over 170 projects have been undertaken and very quickly, project types were identified by the coordinators. Students, however, were only exposed to their own project and so could not easily benefit from the experience of past students. A Web based tool called WIER (Web Industrial Experience Resources) has been developed to: (a) provide a search and review facility for past projects; (b) ease the project administration workload for the students; (c) provide templates and examples of major documentation deliverables; and (d) provide a list of resources (books and URLs) that past students have found useful when researching a topic. A faceted classification scheme has been implemented in WIER to index past projects. Certain constraints of this environment such as the high turnover of programmers (students) and client copyright issues are considered A full evaluation of WIER will be carried out throughout 2001, including formal student feedback and tracking usage of the site's resources.