Software Reuse Methods to Improve Technological Infrastructure for e-Science

Social computing has the potential to contribute to scientific research. Ongoing developments in information and communications technology improve capabilities for enabling scientific research, including research fostered by social computing capabilities. The recent emergence of e-Science practices has demonstrated the benefits from improvements in the technological infrastructure, or cyber-infrastructure, that has been developed to support science. Cloud computing is one example of this e-Science trend. Our own work in the area of software reuse offers methods that can be used to improve new technological development, including cloud computing capabilities, to support scientific research practices. In this paper, we focus on software reuse and its potential to contribute to the development and evaluation of information systems and related services designed to support new capabilities for conducting scientific research

Reuse of Software Assets for the NASA Earth Science Decadal Survey Missions

Software assets from existing Earth science missions can be reused for the new decadal survey missions that are being planned by NASA in response to the 2007 Earth Science National Research Council (NRC) Study. The new missions will require the development of software to curate, process, and disseminate the data to science users of interest and to the broader NASA mission community. In this paper, we discuss new tools and a blossoming community that are being developed by the Earth Science Data System (ESDS) Software Reuse Working Group (SRWG) to improve capabilities for reusing NASA software assets

A Proposed Technology Platform Framework to Support Technology Reuse

AbstractManaging a technology portfolio is one of the great challenges for sustained success, especially in high-technology industries where technologies can be a major selling point. For engineers, this portfolio is more of a toolbox for solving design problems, but in large organizations there can be so many technologies used in different business areas that even the engineers may not be aware of all of them. When the same technologies are used in different types of products, knowledge about them can also be generated by various groups within an organization. To improve the usefulness of a company's technology base, this paper proposes the use of a technology platform approach based on a framework featuring three different types of activities. The first approach is about adapting the technology base to future needs with the help of portfolio management techniques. The second approach serves to create awareness and shared understanding through an interactive technology catalogue, collecting information about how technologies work, where they are applied, and how they are used. The third approach is addressed at engineers who work with the technologies and includes practices for improving the reusability of knowledge recorded in documents and communicated to others who are using a particular technology for development. The framework is intended to support a systematic approach for technology reuse in order to stimulate organizational learning and reduce lead-time and cost of product development

A Proposal on Using Reuse Readiness Levels to Measure Software Reusability

The use of scientific data is becoming increasingly dependent on the software that fosters such use. As the ability to reuse software contributes to capabilities for reusing software-dependent data, instruments for measuring software reusability contribute to the reuse of software and related data. The development and current state of a proposed set of Reuse Readiness Levels (RRLs) are summarized, and potential uses of the software reusability measures are described, along with proposed use cases to support sponsorship of software projects, software production, software adoption, and data stewardship during the systems development lifecycle and the data lifecycle