Contrasting factors for reuse success and failure in aerospace: Semistructured interviews

Abstract

We present the results of a set of semi-structured interviews of experts in aerospace companies. These experts were asked about reuse practices, successes and failures, and the reasons why these happened. We were particularly interested in learning about differences and similarities in reuse approaches for embedded vs. nonembedded systems. In addition, since modern development approaches enable reuse of a wide variety of artifacts, we wanted to know whether artifact reuse was different between embedded and nonembedded systems and whether the experts thought certain development strategies worked better for one type of system than another, and why. Experts were from a variety of corporate cultures. Results indicate that there are important differences. For example, component reuse is more common with embedded systems experts, whereas architecture reuse is more common among nonembedded systems experts. Unlike nonembedded systems experts, embedded systems experts preferred platform standardization over platform independence. Embedded systems experts prefer to use code already developed for the platform intact due to the difficulty of modifying optimized code.