Software Reuse Comment-1

From Tetherless World Wiki

Software Reuse Comment-1 [ Edit ]
About Page	Software_Reuse
Title	Lucy's review
Commented by	Xixi Luo
Date	2008/05/05 12:00:00 AM UTC
Topic:	Ontology Reuse

Content:

1. what is software reuse? Software reuse is the process of using existing software artifacts rather than building them from scratch. Typically, reuse involves the selection, specialization, and integration of artifacts, although different reuse technique may emphasize or deemphasize certain of these.
2. why reuse software artifacts? The primary motivation to reuse software artifacts is to reduce the time and effort required to build software systems.
3. the reuse technology must provide natural, succinct, high-level abstractions that describe artifacts in terms of "what" they do rather than "how" they do it. In other words, there must be a small cognitive distance between informal reasoning and the abstract concepts defined by the reuse technology.
4. Why is software reuse difficult? In order to reuse artifacts, software developers must either be familiar with the abstractions a prior or must take time to study and understand the abstractions The latter case can defeat some or all of the gains in reusing and artifact. The former case is where we have seen significant success in reuse.

Some Truisms:

1. For a software reuse technique to be effective, it must reduce the cognitive distance between the initial concept of a system and its final executable implementation.
2. For a software reuse technique to be effective,it must be easier to reduce the artifacts than it is to develop the software from scratch.
3. To select an artifact for reuse, you must know what it does.
4. To reuse a software artifact effectively, you must be able to "find it" faster than you could "build it"