Software quality through domain-;driven certification

Software reuse is being pursued in an attempt to improve programmer productivity. The concept of reuse is to permit various work products of software development to be used on more than one project in order to amortize their development costs. Productivity is not the only advantage of reuse although it is the most widely publicized. By incorporating reusable components into a new product, the components bring with them whatever qualities they possess, and these can contribute to the quality of the new product. This suggests that reuse might be exploited for achieving quality as an entirely separate goal from improving productivity. If useful properties pertaining to quality could be shown to be present in products as a direct result of software development based on reuse, this might be a cost-;effective way of achieving those qualities irrespective of the productivity advantages. The adjective certified is sometimes used to describe components that have been tested in some way prior to entry into a library but the term certified is not formally defined in the reuse literature. In this paper, we address the issue of certifying reusable components. We advocate the development of software by reuse with the specific intent of establishing as many of the required properties in the final product as possible by depending upon properties present in the reusable components. For this goal to succeed, a precise definition of certification of reusable components is required and such a definition is presented. The benefits of the definition and the way in which it supports the goal are explored.     

Experiences of a software reuse project

Despite the large number of successful software reuse cases reported, there are more than a few negative views that reuse has not yet delivered as expected. This is because of the lack of consensus on the applicative conditions of reuse technology and the size of the benefits that can be expected. This article describes a software reuse project conducted at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) Software Laboratories. Based on this experience, the article discusses such important aspects of software reuse as domain selection and analysis, impediments, incentives, and library tools. It concludes that successful software reuse requires the selection of appropriate domains, systematic development of reusable modules based on domain analysis, and the commitment of senior management.     

基于软件重用的焊接过程监测系统分析与设计

焊接过程监测系统对于提高劳动生产率,确保焊接产品的质量具有重要意义.而要开发出实用的监测软件系统面临着诸如:开发周期长、成本高,系统通用性差、集成难度大等困难.软件重用技术能够为解决上述困难提供一条行之有效的途径.事实上,在目前焊接过程监测软件开发领域中,软件重用意识不高,可重用构件和架构还很缺乏.于是,尝试运用软件重用技术对焊接过程监测系统的架构和构件进行分析和设计.实验室中的系统开发实践表明,运用软件重用技术建立领域架构和构件库并使之逐步完善,可以使得焊接过程监测系统的研制和开发更加高效.     

Toward an engineering discipline of software reuse

This article stems from a panel session at the 1997 Symposium on Software Reusability, and discusses open research issues, classified by goal and by approach. Software development cannot possibly become an engineering discipline so long as it has not perfected a technology for developing products from reusable assets in a routine manner, on an industrial scale. Software reuse cannot, in turn, achieve this status unless we make the following provisions: a sound scientific foundation that encompasses relevant design principles, widely acceptable engineering standards that compile these principles into working practical solutions, and coherent managerial standards that enable the deployment of these solutions under acceptable conditions of product quality and process maturity. Although successful software reuse experiments are increasingly common, success is not the norm, software reuse is not a matter of routine practice, the promises of software reuse remain for the most part unfulfilled, and a number of issues remain worthy of further research     

Effects of reuse on quality, productivity, and economics

This article presents metrics from two Hewlett-Packard (HP) reuse programs that document the improved quality, increased productivity, shortened time-to-market, and enhanced economics resulting from reuse. Work products are the products or by-products of the software-development process: for example, code, design, and test plans. Reuse is the use of these work products without modification in the development of other software. Leveraged reuse is modifying existing work products to meet specific system requirements. A producer is a creator of reusable work products, and the consumer is someone who uses them to create other software. Time-to-market is the time it takes to deliver a product from the time it is conceived. Experience with reuse has been largely positive. Because work products are used multiple times, the accumulated defect fixes result in a higher quality work product. Because the work products have already been created, tested, and documented, productivity increases because consumers of reusable work products need to do less work. However, increased productivity from reuse does not necessarily shorten time-to-market. To reduce time-to-market, reuse must be used effectively on the critical path of a development project. Finally, we have found that reuse allows an organization to use personnel more effectively because it leverages expertise. However, software reuse is not free. It requires resources to create and maintain reusable work products, a reuse library, and reuse tools. To help evaluate the costs and benefits of reuse, we have developed an economic analysis method, which we have applied to multiple reuse programs at HP     

SPARTACAS: automating component reuse and adaptation

A continuing challenge for software designers is to develop efficient and cost-effective software implementations. Many see software reuse as a potential solution; however, the cost of reuse tends to outweigh the potential benefits. The costs of software reuse include establishing and maintaining a library of reusable components, searching for applicable components to be reused in a design, as well as adapting components toward a proper implementation. We introduce SPARTACAS, a framework for automating specification-based component retrieval and adaptation that has been successfully applied to synthesis of software for embedded and digital signal processing systems. Using specifications to abstractly represent implementations allows automated theorem-provers to formally verify logical reusability relationships between specifications. These logical relationships are used to evaluate the feasibility of reusing the implementations of components to implement a problem. Retrieving a component that is a complete match to a problem is rare. It is more common to retrieve a component that partially satisfies the requirements of a problem. Such components have to be adapted. Rather than adapting components at the code level, SPARTACAS adapts the behavior of partial matches by imposing interactions with other components at the architecture level. A subproblem is synthesized that specifies the missing functionality required to complete the problem; the subproblem is used to query the library for components to adapt the partial match. The framework was implemented and evaluated empirically, the results suggest that automated adaptation using architectures successfully promotes software reuse, and hierarchically organizes a solution to a design problem.     

Information access tools for software reuse

Software reuse has long been touted as an effective means to develop software products. But reuse technologies for software have not lived up to expectations. Among the barriers are high costs of building software repositories and the need for effective tools to help designers locate reusable software. Although many design-for-reuse and software classification efforts have been proposed, these methods are cost-intensive and cannot effectively take advantage of large stores of design artifacts that many development organizations have accumulated. Methods are needed that take advantage of these valuable resources in a cost-effective manner. This article describes an approach to the design of tools to help software designers build repositories of software components and locate potentially reusable software in those repositories. The approach is investigated with a retrieval tool, named CodeFinder, which supports the process of retrieving software components when information needs are ill-defined and users are not familiar with vocabulary used in the repository. CodeFinder uses an innovative integration of tools for the incremental refinement of queries and a retrieval mechanism that finds information associatively related to a query. Empirical evaluation of CodeFinder has demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach.     

Building enterprise reuse program

Reuse is viewed as a realistically effective approach to solving software crisis. For an organization that wants to build a reuse program, technical and non-technical issues must be considered in parallel. In this paper, a model-based approach to building systematic reuse program is presented. Component-based reuse is currently a dominant approach to software reuse. In this approach, building the right reusable component model is the first important step. In order to achieve systematic reuse, a set of component models should be built from different perspectives. Each of these models will give a specific view of the components so as to satisfy different needs of different persons involved in the enterprise reuse program. There already exist some component models for reuse from technical perspectives. But less attention is paid to the reusable components from a non-technical view, especially from the view of process and management. In our approach, a reusable component model—FLP model for reusable component—is introduced. This model describes components from three dimensions (Form, Level, and Presentation) and views components and their relationships from the perspective of process and management. It determines the sphere of reusable components, the time points of reusing components in the development process, and the needed means to present components in terms of the abstraction level, logic granularity and presentation media. Being the basis on which the management and technical decisions are made, our model will be used as the kernel model to initialize and normalize a systematic enterprise reuse program.     

Success factors of systematic reuse

Systematic software reuse is a paradigm shift in software engineering from building single systems to building families of related systems. The goal of software reuse research is to discover systematic procedures for engineering new systems from existing assets. Implementing systematic reuse is risky. Not doing it is also risky. Trying systematic reuse unsuccessfully can cost precious time and resources and may make management sceptical of trying it again. But if your competitors do it successfully and you do not, you may lose market share and possibly an entire market. There is no cookbook solution-each organization must analyze its own needs, implement reuse measurements, define the key benefits it expects, identify and remove impediments, and manage risk. Reliable data on how much this costs and the benefits an organization will derive are insufficient. The article addresses issues from management, measurement, law, economics, libraries, and the design of reusable software     

Building enterprise reuse program——A model-based approach

Reuse is viewed as a realistically effective approach to solving software crisis. For an organization that wants to build a reuse program, technical and non-technical issues must be considered in parallel. In this paper, a model-based approach to building systematic reuse program is presented. Component-based reuse is currently a dominant approach to software reuse. In this approach, building the right reusable component model is the first important step. In order to achieve systematic reuse, a set of component models should be built from different perspectives. Each of these models will give a specific view of the components so as to satisfy different needs of different persons involved in the enterprise reuse program. There already exist some component models for reuse from technical perspectives. But less attention is paid to the reusable components from a non-technical view, especially fromthe view of process and management. In our approach, a reusable component model--FLP modelfor reusable component     

Reusing software: issues and research directions

Software productivity has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, but not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver; nothing short of an order of magnitude increase in productivity will extricate the software industry from its perennial crisis. Several decades of intensive research in software engineering and artificial intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only) realistic approach to bring about the gains of productivity and quality that the software industry needs. In this paper, we discuss the implications of reuse on the production, with an emphasis on the technical challenges. Software reuse involves building software that is reusable by design and building with reusable software. Software reuse includes reusing both the products of previous software projects and the processes deployed to produce them, leading to a wide spectrum of reuse approaches, from the building blocks (reusing products) approach, on one hand, to the generative or reusable processor (reusing processes), on the other. We discuss the implication of such approaches on the organization, control, and method of software development and discuss proposed models for their economic analysis. Software reuse benefits from methodologies and tools to: (1) build more readily reusable software and (2) locate, evaluate, and tailor reusable software, the last being critical for the building blocks approach. Both sets of issues are discussed in this paper, with a focus on application generators and OO development for the first and a thorough discussion of retrieval techniques for software components, component composition (or bottom-up design), and transformational systems for the second. We conclude by highlighting areas that, in our opinion, are worthy of further investigation     

The REBOOT approach to software reuse

Although some companies have been successful in software reuse, many research projects on reuse have had little industrial penetration. Often the proposed technology has been too ambitious or exotic, or did not scale up. REBOOT emphasizes industrial applicability of the proposed technology in a holistic perspective: a validated method through a Methodology Handbook, a stabilized tool set around a reuse library, a training package, and initial software repositories of reusable components extracted from company-specific projects. This article presents the REBOOT approach to software reuse, covering both organizational and technical aspects and the experiences so far from the applications.     

Software reuse through re-engineering the legacy systems

Software reuse is widely considered to be a way to increase the productivity and improve the quality and reliability of new software systems. Identifying, extracting and re-engineering software components that implement abstractions within existing systems is a promising cost-effective way to create reusable assets and re-engineer legacy systems. This paper summarizes our experiences with using computer-supported methods to develop a software architecture to support the re-engineering of the Janus Combat Simulation System. In this effort, we have developed an object-oriented architecture for the Janus Combat Simulation Subsystem, and validated the architecture with an executable prototype. In this paper, we propose methods to facilitate the reuse of the software components of the legacy systems by recovering the behavior of the systems using systematic methods, and illustrate their use in the context of the Janus System.     

软件构件表示与检索形式化的研究与进展

1 引言软件复用被认为是提高软件生产效率和软件质量较为现实的途径。尽管软件复用的思想已经提出了30多年,但软件复用的现状离人们最初的设想仍然相距甚远。阻碍大规模软件复用的技术与非技术因素很多,主要的技术因素有构件分类、构件表示、构件检索、构件更改及构件库的管理与维护等。其中,软件构件表示与检索是软件复用获得成功的重要前提。     

Managing object oriented framework reuse

Reusing frameworks instead of libraries can cause subtle architectural changes in an application, calling for innovative management solutions. We relate our experience in managing the Knowledge-Based Software Assistant project and offer tips for buying, building and using frameworks. One of the promises of object-oriented software development is that organizations can get a significant return on development investment because the code is easier to reuse. Software project managers are often eager to take the OO plunge for that reason, but are uncertain about the management issues they will face. There is also the problem of choosing the best form of reuse. Library-based reuse, the traditional reuse form, is more popular than framework-based reuse, but we have found that framework-based reuse offers many more benefits with the right management approach. We describe the lessons we learned when building the Knowledge-Based Software Assistant/Advanced Development Model     

An integrative approach to requirements analysis: How task models support requirements reuse in a user-centric design framework

Many software systems fail to address their intended purpose because of a lack of user involvement and requirements deficiencies. This paper discusses the elaboration of a requirements-analysis process that integrates a critical-parameter-based approach to task modeling within a user-centric design framework. On one hand, adapting task models to capture requirements bridges the gap between scenarios and critical parameters which benefits design from the standpoint of user involvement and accurate requirements. On the other hand, using task models as a reusable component leverages requirements reuse which benefits design by increasing quality while simultaneously reducing development costs and time-to-market. First, we present the establishment of both a user-centric and reuse-centric requirements process along with its implementation within an integrated design tool suite. Secondly, we report the design, procedures, and findings of two user studies aimed at assessing the feasibility for novice designers to conduct the process as well as evaluating the resulting benefits upon requirements-analysis deliverables, requirements quality, and requirements reuse.     

支持软件重用的程序设计语言

本文提出一种支持软件重用的程序语言并给出了重用描述语言翻译器的工作原理。该语言是在宿主语言Ｃ＋＋中加入“重用描述”成分和“装配语句”而形成的。该文件以软件重用库为依托,重用描述用于表达用户在程序中对部件的要求,重用描述语言翻译器则分析这些需求,自动在库中查找提出部件来适应用户。     

The impact of software evolution and reuse on software quality

This paper presents a case study of a software project in the maintenance phase. The case study was based on a sample of modules, representing about 1.3 million lines of code, from a very large telecommunications system. Software quality models were developed to predict the number of faults expected from the coding through operations phases. Since modules from the prior release were often reused to develop a new release, one model incorporated reuse data as additional independent variables. We compare this model's performance to a similar model without reuse data.Software quality models often have product metrics as the only input data for predicting quality. There is an implicit assumption that all the modules have had a similar development history, so that product attributes are the primary drivers of different quality levels. Reuse of software as components and software evolution do not fit this assumption very well, and consequently, traditional models for such environments may not have adequate accuracy. Focusing on the software maintenance phase, this study demonstrated that reuse data can significantly improve the predictive accuracy of software quality models.     

复用研究在软件应用开发领域研述

软件重用是近年来软件工程一个很活跃的研究领域。实践证明,软件重用是从根本上提高软件生产率、降低成本、提高质量的有效途径。但同时,软件重用还需要在关键技术、管理等很多方面引入注重实效的变革。该文首先介绍了软件重用的概念以及可重用的软件成分,随即介绍了软件重用技术,最后提出了在实际应用中使用软件重用技术的要点。