Reuse in component-based prototyping: an industrial experience report from 15 years of reuse

Abstract

At Thales Defense Mission Systems, software products first go through an industrial prototyping phase. We elaborate evolutionary prototypes which implement complete business behavior and fulfill functional requirements. We elaborate and evolve our solutions directly with end-users who act as stake-holders in the products’ design. Prototypes also serve as models for the final products development. Because software products in the defense industry are developed over many years, this prototyping phase is crucial. Therefore, reusing software is a high-stakes issue in our activities. Component-oriented development helps us to foster reuse throughout the life cycle of our products. The work presented in this paper stems from 15 years of experience in developing prototypes for the defense industry. We directly reuse component implementations to build new prototypes from existing ones. We reuse component interfaces transparently in multiple prototypes, whatever the underlying implementation solutions. This kind of reuse spans prototypes and final products which are deployed on different execution platforms. We reuse non-component legacy software that we integrate in our component architectures. In this case, we seamlessly augment standard classes with component behavior, while preserving legacy code. In this paper, we present our component programming framework with a focus on component reuse in the context of evolutionary prototyping. We study our prototypes composition through data we extracted from our code repository. On these last 15 years we observe that, in average, our prototypes are composed of 80% reused components. Today, some of our prototypes can be constituted of more than 96% reused components. In this context, we report three reuse scenarios we regularly encounter in our prototyping activity, and that motivates our engineering efforts toward reusable components.