Software reuse is the process of creating software systems from existing software rather than building software systems from scratch. This simple yet powerful vision was introduced in 1968. Software reuse has, however, failed to become a standard software engineering practice. In an attempt to understand why, researchers have renewed their interest in software reuse and in the obstacles to implementing it.This paper surveys the different approaches to software reuse found in the research literature. It uses a taxonomy to describe and compare the different approaches and make generalizations about the field of software reuse. The taxonomy characterizes each reuse approach in terms of its reusable artifacts and the way these artifacts are abstracted, selected, specialized, and integrated.Abstraction plays a central role in software reuse. Concise and expressive abstractions are essential if software artifacts are to be effectively reused. The effectiveness of a reuse technique can be evaluated in terms of cognitive distance—an intuitive gauge of the intellectual effort required to use the technique. Cognitive distance is reduced in two ways: (1) Higher level abstractions in a reuse technique reduce the effort required to go from the initial concept of a software system to representations in the reuse technique, and (2) automation reduces the effort required to go from abstractions in a reuse technique to an executable implementation.This survey will help answer the following questions: What is software reuse? Why reuse software? What are the different approaches to reusing software? How effective are the different approaches? What is required to implement a software reuse technology? Why is software reuse difficult? What are the open areas for research in software reuse?

Software reuse

Object-oriented programming is as much a different way of designing programs as it is a different way of designing programming languages. This paper describes what it is like to design systems in Smalltalk. In particular, since a major motivation for object-oriented programming is software reuse, this paper describes how classes are developed so that they will be reusable.

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Designing reusable classes

Computing power and network bandwidth have increased dramatically over the past decade However, the design and implementation of complex software remains expensive and error-prone Much of the cost and effort stems from the continuous rediscovery and re-invention of core concepts and components across the software industry In particular, the growing heterogeneity of hardware architectures and diversity of operating system and communication platforms makes it hard to build correct, portable, efficient, and inexpensive applications from scratch Object-oriented (OO) application frameworks are a promising technology for reifying proven software designs and implementations in order to reduce the cost and improve the quality of software A framework is a reusable, ``semi-complete'' application that can be specialized to produce custom applications [Johnson:88] In contrast to earlier OO reuse techniques based on class libraries, frameworks are targeted for particular business units (such as data processing or cellular communications) and application domains (such as user interfaces or real-time avionics) Frameworks like MacApp, ET++, Interviews, ACE, Microsoft's MFC and DCOM, JavaSoft's RMI, and implementations of OMG's CORBA play an increasingly important role in contemporary software development

Object-oriented application frameworks

We present a domain-independent model of hierarchical software system design and construction that is based on interchangeable software components and large-scale reuse. The model unifies the conceptualizations of two independent projects, Genesis and Avoca, that are successful examples of software component/building-block technologies and domain modeling. Building-block technologies exploit large-scale reuse, rely on open architecture software, and elevate the granularity of programming to the subsystem level. Domain modeling formalizes the similarities and differences among systems of a domain. We believe our model is a blueprint for achieving software component technologies in many domains.

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G. Arango

Papers

Domain Analysis and Software Systems Modeling