Introducing a software reuse culture in practice

Abstract

The following paper deals with experiences derived from an industrial consulting project for designing a reuse model. The model is oriented towards actual use in practice and therefore also towards different levels of reuse intensity. It was outlined for a company employing more than 200 software engineers who primarily develop software for bank services and bank administrations. The field of investigation on hand is connected with a lot of vital software engineering (SE) questions for any larger developer: heterogeneity in age of software, heterogeneity of applications, heterogeneity of development environments as well as different levels of software engineering consciousness and of knowledge among the software engineers. The model presented is drawn from state-of-the-art suggestions in reuse research which were adapted to meet local constraints of time and costs. The model can be taken as a recipe for reuse in practice as it is providing three different levels of reuse intensities/investments, and thus returning three different levels of reuse maturity.

Level I reuse maturity in practice is to achieve maintainability: Many older programs turned out to be widely undocumented; often requirements and/or abstract design were missing, the programs do not meet basic criteria of maintainability.

Level II reuse maturity is represented by balance within similar projects: We define a group of software systems as balanced, if there is a clear top-down structure from the general to the specific in documents concerning analysis, design, code and test. A new but similar system can be designed reusing upper level software document components and adapting lower level ones.

Level III reuse maturity affords several technical and organizational efforts to establish a true reuse culture. Making a reuse culture work needs developing, providing and enforcing of standards. On the technical level this requires the use of repositories for all phases of development as well as the application of quality assurance methodology. On the organizational level cooperation among people responsible for the development of standards (metric analysis, quality check through reviews) as well as those coordinating the reuse environment is required. The roles for a reuse culture as well as the educational prerequisites are defined.

The value of the presented work lies in mapping the reuse state-of-the-art to often appearing financial and organizational restrictions consciously, thus opening possibilities beyond the “total reuse or no reuse” advice.