Reuse Of Artifacts Research Articles

Case-based design browser to support software reuse: theoretical structure and empirical evaluation

With the proliferation of large, complex software systems, reuse of previous software designs and software artifacts, such as operation concepts, requirements, specifications and source code, is an important issue for both industry and government. Reuse has long been expected to result in substantial productivity and quality gains. To date, this expectation has been largely unmet. One reason may be the lack of tools to support software reuse.This research proposes the development of one such tool, the Design Browser. The Design Browser is a software architecture intended to support designers of large software systems in the early stages of software design, specifically conceptual design. The Design Browser is based on principles derived from cognitive engineering (e.g. Woods & Roth, 1988 a); naturalistic decision-making, particularly Klein's (1989) recognition-primed decision making model; and Kolodner's (1993) approach to case-based reasoning.As a proof-of-concept demonstration, the Design Browser was implemented for a NASA satellite control sub-system—the command management system (CMS). An empirical evaluation was conducted. It used the CMS Design Browser and participants who were part of the three user groups often involved in large-scale commercial software development. These groups are the software design team, the users and management. The results of the evaluation show that all three groups found the CMS Design Browser quite useful as demonstrated by actual performance and subjective rating.

Feature-oriented engineering of PBX software for adaptability and reuseability

Incorporating a high level of adaptability and reusability into software is one challenge that all software engineers face. PBX (Private Branch Exchange) is one such system that requires a high level of adaptability and reusability because of rapidly expanding service features, ever changing communication technology, continuously evolving standards and diverse communication laws and standards in different countries. The software engineering community has made various efforts to address the problem of enhancing software adaptability and reusability. As a result, many programming concepts, such as information hiding, encapsulation, object orientation, abstract data type and modularization, have been developed. Although adequate application of these principles requires the domain or program family perspective, most methods, so far, have been oriented toward developing a single application. FORM (Feature-Oriented Reuse Method), the domain-based software reuse method applied in this paper, concentrates on analyzing and modeling commonalities and differences in applications of a given domain and using the analysis results to develop domain-oriented architectures and software components. The model that captures commonalities and differences is called the ‘feature model’ and it is used for both the engineering of reusable domain artifacts and the development of actual application software with reusable artifacts. We found that FORM facilitates analysis of variability, as well as commonality, of software before the start of engineering and implementation. With this understanding, adaptability and reusability can be built into software. Also, feature modeling has been found to be an effective method for identifying objects. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

3 Software Reusable Artifacts Evolution: A Three Levels of Abstraction Framework

AbstractThe software crisis is still going on but is nowadays, more critical than ever as organizations cannot exist without operational software. Ramifications of the software crisis are both economic and social. In that context, software reuse is a key technology which permits organization to cope with many aspects of the software crisis (maintenance costs and development cycle times reduction, software systems quality increase). However, despite the potential benefits of software reuse, current reuse methods, techniques and tools fail to improve the software development process productivity and the software products quality. In particular, existing software technology doesn't take into account the organizational aspects of the software reuse process complexity. In this paper, we propose a three‐ levels of abstraction (conceptual, organizational, technical) framework to describe the reusable artifacts evolution activity. The conceptual level lists the main tasks of the evolution activity and the data flows they exchange. The organizational level describes the actors contributing to the evolution activity and the evolution tasks carried out by each actor. The technical level emphasizes the version control problems resulting from reusable artifacts evolution and defines a set of basic rules to cope with these problems.

Structure abstractions in retrieval of analogical software models

Within object-oriented software engineering, there may be a high potential for reuse of artifacts ranging from requirement specifications to code if one is able to identify analogies between systems at an early stage, i.e. in the analysis process. This paper addresses the problem of analogical retrieval of object-oriented OOram software analysis models from a repository of such. Effective retrieval of analogs is hard both for humans and computers, and humans as well as many computer models mainly use surface properties. However, cognitive science research on analogy shows that structural properties of a situation must be considered just as important. In this paper an algorithm for obtaining abstractions of the structural properties of an OOram model is presented. The algorithm returns high level descriptions of the communication patterns between objects in the analysis models. The descriptors used are chain, ring, star, and tree and in addition parameters. Experiments with synthetic data show that combining these abstractions with semantic information about the objects in the models improves retrieval.

A course in software reuse with Ada 95

Courses in software reuse based on Ada have been taught for several years in Department of Computer Science at North Carolina A&T State university [2][5][6]. The course materials have been updated and adopted for Ada 95 under a curriculum development grant from the Defense Information System Agency. The new course forms a semester-long undergraduate course titled "Software Reuse with Ada 95".In this course software reuse levels, general criteria, and software development with reuse are overviewed. Software development for reuse and object-oriented design techniques that support reuse are taught. Ada 95's object-oriented features and how to integrate these features to develop reusable artifacts are examined. Reuse library and management techniques are discussed. Students are trained as designers, implementers and clients. They practice the object oriented software development process by implementing a team project.

Reuse of early life-cycle artifacts: workproducts, methods and tools

In this article we describe the importance of reusing software artifacts resulting from the earliest stages of the development lifedcycle, i.e., software conception, requirements analysis, feasibility study, requirements specification, architectural and detailed design. Although reuse of early artifacts is deemed beneficial to software development projects, there are no readily available software tools that could facilitate their effective reuse. Hence, we identified nearly one hundred early artifact types. We analyzed, compared and contrasted them. We clustered similar artifact types into distinct artifact affinity groups. We then proposed several methods and techniques useful in the processing of these artifacts to support their reuse. We believe that the proposed methods could be utilized by tool builders to construct software development environments capable of assisting analysts, designers, architects and programmers to effectively reuse the results of early lifedcycle activities.

Viewpoint-centred reuse

The "Reuse without Reusers" SyndromeThe problems of low productivity, late delivery and poor software quality are, unfortunately, characteristic of the software industry (Horowitz and Munson 1989). Increasingly, software developers are looking towards reuse as a possible solution to these problems.However, attempting to develop genuinely reusable artifacts without a firm understanding of the reuser's (or potential reuser's) needs, i.e. their "reuse requirements", is a difficult process. A lack of understanding and general detachment of the reuser from the reuse process is a situation recognised in this paper as the "reuse without reusers" syndrome.The aim of this paper is to highlight the role played by the reuser in the reuse process, and to encourage more user-centric approaches to key reuse activities such as domain analysis (Prieto-Diaz 1990). We do this by describing a reuse process called Viewpoint-Centred reuse (VCR), which forms part of our current research agenda in the ART (Applied Reuse Technology) project at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

The role of opportunism in the software design reuse process

Software design involves translating a set of task requirements into a structured description of a computer program that will perform the task. A software designer can use design schema, collaborative design knowledge, or can reuse design artifacts. Very little has been done to include reuse of design artifacts in the software development life cycle, despite tremendous promises of reuse. As a result, this technique has not seen widespread use, possibly due to a lack of cognitive understanding of the reuse process. This research explores the role of a specific cognitive aspect, opportunism, in demand-side software reuse. We propose a cognitive model based on opportunism that describes the software design process with reuse. Protocol analysis verifies that the software design with reuse is indeed opportunistic and reveals that some software designers employ certain tasks of the reuse process frequently. Based on these findings, we propose a reuse support system that incorporates blackboard technology and existing reuse library management system.

An integrated solution based approach to software development using unified reuse artifacts

Although development processes are considered important in determining the quality of the product, often processes and products are considered as separate entities. This results in loss of information regarding dependencies spanning across processes and products. In this paper we propose a unit called Unified Reuse Artifact (URA) which can represent artifacts of either the "process" or the "product," in effect representing an artifact of the "solution." With this, a solution is represented as a directed graph of URAs establishing dependencies in a unified manner. This helps bring in other possibilities like project tracking, deciphering contexts and evolution in a unified way, etc. We then propose a process model oriented towards solutions, and which strives to reuse earlier experiences with the concept of a "Solution Framework."

Intelligent multimedia repositories (IMRs) for project estimation and management: an empirical study

This research explores whether the use of multimedia and intelligent agents foster the reuse of artifacts from a repository. That is, can a repository enhance reuse effectivity if it can (1) offer diverse media for conveying an artifact's information, and (2) utilize agents that support human reuse processes? A study was conducted with 33 professional respondents in a software project estimation repository. Performance and reaction data were collected on the purpose, role, usefulness, impact, and importance of 14 media/artifact categories. Results show the repository improves performance significantly, and the multimedia and agents play an important role. Specific lessons learned are offered for the design of reuse repositories, the use of multimedia, and the role for intelligent agents.

Reuse contracts

A critical concern in the reuse of software is the propagation of changes made to reusable artifacts. Without techniques to manage these changes, multiple versions of these artifacts will propagate through different systems and reusers will not be able to benefit from improvements to the original artifact. We propose to codify the management of change in a software system by means of reuse contracts that record the protocol between managers and users of a reusable asset. Just as real world contracts can be extended, amended and customised, reuse contracts are subject to parallel changes encoded by formal reuse operators: extension, refinement and concretisation. Reuse contracts and their operators serve as structured documentation and facilitate the propagation of changes to reusable assets by indicating how much work is needed to update previously built applications, where and how to test and how to adjust these applications.

Knowledge Management Tools for Business Process Support and Reengineering

Reengineering organizational processes is an imperative in today's business climate, and technology can play an important role in understanding, managing and reengineering business processes. In particular, what we call ‘knowledge management tools’ can be used to streamline process descriptions and deliver organizational knowledge in a timely and appropriate manner. These tools can also facilitate process reengineering by structuring previously informal work artifacts, enabling artifact reuse and promoting more effective organizational collaboration. This paper discusses two research and development collaborations that resulted in deployed knowledge management tools for a large business unit of AT&T, and discusses the importance of managing expectations, the need for existing process maturity, and the issue of knowledge maintenance in technology-driven business process reengineering. © 1996 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An Improved Algorithm for Identifying Objects in Code

The identification of abstractions within existing software systems is an important problem to be solved to facilitate program comprehension and the construction of a set of reusable artifacts. In particular, of interest is the identification of object-like features in procedural programs. Existing techniques and algorithms achieve some level of success but do not, in general, always precisely identify a coherent set of objects. The identified objects tend to contain spurious methods that are only tenuously related to the object and require a great deal of human effort and understanding to unravel. This paper presents an improved algorithm that overcomes these drawbacks and enables the precise identification of objects with less human intervention and understanding by exploiting simple statistical techniques. The algorithm is applied to several sample programs and the results are compared with existing algorithms. Finally, the application of the algorithm to a real medium-size system is described and discussed. The algorithm was developed as part of the RE2 project in which the identification of object-like features in existing systems is the basis for a re-engineering process aimed at populating a repository of reusable assets.

An Improved Algorithm for Identifying Objects in Code

The identification of abstractions within existing software systems is an important problem to be solved to facilitate program comprehension and the construction of a set of reusable artifacts. In particular, of interest is the identification of object-like features in procedural programs. Existing techniques and algorithms achieve some level of success but do not, in general, always precisely identify a coherent set of objects. The identified objects tend to contain spurious methods that are only tenuously related to the object and require a great deal of human effort and understanding to unravel. This paper presents an improved algorithm that overcomes these drawbacks and enables the precise identification of objects with less human intervention and understanding by exploiting simple statistical techniques. The algorithm is applied to several sample programs and the results are compared with existing algorithms. Finally, the application of the algorithm to a real medium-size system is described and discussed. The algorithm was developed as part of the RE 2 project in which the identification of object-like features in existing systems is the basis for a re-engineering process aimed at populating a repository of reusable assets.

Reuse dimensions

In recent years, there have been much publications on reuse. In order to bet an overview of the whole field and also a good impression of the state of the reuse art, we studied reuse literature of the last few years. As basis for comparison, we classified literature according to four (more or less orthogonal) dimensions, based on the actions and knowledge of the reuser, i.e. the software engineer. The dimensions are: actions to be taken to get an existing reusable item; knowledge to be applied to find an existing reusable item; actions to be taken to build the complete system needed; knowledge to be applied to get the complete system needed. The survey shows that research on reuse from the viewpoint of needed system, receives far less attention than research from the viewpoint of reusable artifacts. We expect reuse to live up to its promise if this topic is addressed was well.

Domestic, municipal and industrial refuse in the UK

The most important single step in effective waste-management is to avoid mixing the different components of rubbish at the sources of its generation. Once collected, the wise treatment of refuse would result in (i) recycling re-usable artefacts and materials, (ii) conserving fossil-fuel reserves and (iii) protecting the environment from degradation. In particular, because glass and metals need high energy-inputs per tonne to produce, they should be recycled wherever and whenever economically feasible. Annually, in England and Wales, more than 29 × 10 6 tonnes of municipal refuse is generated and about 10 per cent of this is incinerated. Even less is converted into useful energy, but, nevertheless even this small fraction makes a worthwhile contribution to the UK economy. So a review of the historical trends concerning the composition of UK refuse is presented, together with an outline of its rôle in the materials' cycle and the means of dealing with it. Possibly this will encourage better use to be made of the components of refuse, which is a major resource. We can no longer refuse to acknowledge the importance of refuse!

Tecali Vessel Manufacturing Debris at Tollan, Mexico

The evidence for the production of tecali (travertine) vessels at Tollan, Hidalgo, Mexico is examined and some possible secondary uses for the resultant waste materials are considered. An attempt is also made to show how artifact reuse can confuse the archaeological record, possibly leading to false conclusions.

Testing Stratigraphy and Artifact Reuse through Obsidian Hydration Dating

AbstractDating a moderately large sample of obsidian artifacts from a site can contribute highly accurate knowledge about three basic unknowns for site deposits: (1) the presence or absence of a statistically significant tendency towards superposition in the deposit; (2) the nature and degree of disturbance inhibiting the full expression of the superpositional tendency; and (3) the directional bias associated with the disturbance.Deposits of the following three sites are analyzed: Mammoth Junction site, California; La Victoria site, Guatemala; and the Chorrera R-B-1 site, Ecuador. A test for artifact reuse is described and is applied to the three sites.