A system engineering approach for reusable software

In recent years, software reuse becomes a major concern in assuring software quality and saving time and cost of software product development in many software projects. Almost all of the research has focused on code reuse only, although requirement and design reuse is the base of software reusing. Besides, there is lack of system engineering approach in software reusing process researches. In order to build reusing procedure and approach systematically, and develop reusable software products effectively, this paper provides a system engineering approach for reusable software, combining a multiple iterative model. The approach contains six processes, including requirement, design, implementation, test, maintenance and reuse. In each process, there are some analyzing tasks and essential outputs. Besides, the paper describes the relationship between each process. Additionally, this paper gives a case to demonstrate how to use the approach. The case indicates that the approach could take advantage of software lifecycle model and reusing technical methodology together, and gives a reasonable reusing process in software engineering. Finally, the advantages of this approach and the future work would be discussed.