Reuse sensitive process models: are process elements software assets too?

It is well recognised that development with reuse, or reuse-sensitive software process, contribute to software quality improvement. Reusability is one of the software quality factors and represents an appropriate solution for the development of complex software systems that are more and more considered a composition of reusable software assets. The challenge is no more in building new products from scratch, but in reusing and integrating various existing (eventually large and complex) assets supplied by a number of different producers, tailoring them to a specific market or architecture and controlling the evolution of these products with respect to the evolution of the individual assets. Such a strategy, known as system composition, has several advantages which are described. In return, reuse-sensitive software process requires in general a great deal of knowledge about the application domain and previous applications. We come back to this discussion, and extend it by advocating that software process models are complex software systems and this leads us to the following issue: why don´t we apply a reuse-sensitive process to support process model development? In this way we will “inherit” from software engineering a well recognised and successful methodology (i.e. reuse methodology), adapt it, and use it to provide a support to the process model development process, i.e. metaprocess, which remains a critical and open issue