Integrated Collections: Approach to Software Component Reuse

Software reuse has yet to offer well-defined methodologies and mature technologies for developing applications with reuse. Implementing a successful reuse initiative to realize the perceived benefits of reuse requires initial investment that makes the cost of reuse prohibitive for many organizations. The most common form of reusable assets is source code. In some estimates, domain-specific components represent up to 65% of the application size. One approach to effective reuse practices focus on domain-specific components. This work investigates software reuse practices and presents an integrated approach to component-based development to motivate domain-specific component reuse with emphasis on source code artifacts. The approach defines collections of reusable components that are integrated into the development environment. The concept of generic interface is also utilized to define a wrapper interface mechanism to manage and control the interfacing of reusable collections with applications in the domain of interest. The approach is mainly based on programming effort and does not require additional effort dealing with the managerial and organizational aspects of implementing comprehensive reuse initiatives