Reusability in software engineering

This paper surveys recent work concerning reusability in software engineering. The current directions in software reusability are discussed, and the two major approaches of reusable building blocks and reusable patterns studied. An extensive bibliography, parts of which are annotated, is included

An Ontological formalization of the planning task

In this paper we propose a generic task ontology, which formalizes the space of planning problems. Although planning is one of the oldest researched areas in Artificial Intelligence and attempts have been made in the past at developing task ontologies for planning, these formalizations suffer from serious limitations: they do not exhibit the required level of formalization and precision and they usually fail to include some of the key concepts required for specifying planning problems. In con-trast with earlier proposals, our task ontology formalizes the nature of the planning task independently of any planning paradigm, specific domains, or applications and provides a fine-grained, precise and comprehensive characterization of the space of planning problems. Finally, in addition to producing a formal specification we have also operationalized the ontology into a set of executable definitions, which provide a concrete reusable resource for knowledge acquisition and system development in planning applications

Construction by Replacement: A new approach to simulation modeling

Simulation modeling can be valuable in many areas of management science, but it is often costly, time-consuming, and difficult to do. To reduce these problems, system dynamics researchers have previously developed standard pieces of model structure, called molecules, that can be reused in different models. However, the models assembled from these molecules often lacked feedback loops and generated few, if any, insights. This paper describes a new and more promising approach to using molecules in system dynamics modeling. The heart of the approach is a systematically organized library (or taxonomy) of predefined model components, or molecules, and a set of software tools for replacing one molecule with another. Users start with a simple generic model and progressively replace parts of the model with more specialized molecules from a systematically organized library of predefined components. These substitutions either create a new running model automatically or request further manual changes from the user. The paper describes our exploration using this approach to construct system dynamics models of supply chain processes in a large manufacturing company. The experiment included developing an innovative “tangible user interface” and a comprehensive catalog of system dynamics molecules. The paper concludes with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of this approach

From Method Fragments to Method Services

In Method Engineering (ME) science, the key issue is the consideration of information system development methods as fragments. Numerous ME approaches have produced several definitions of method parts. Different in nature, these fragments have nevertheless some common disadvantages: lack of implementation tools, insufficient standardization effort, and so on. On the whole, the observed drawbacks are related to the shortage of usage orientation. We have proceeded to an in-depth analysis of existing method fragments within a comparison framework in order to identify their drawbacks. We suggest overcoming them by an improvement of the ?method service? concept. In this paper, the method service is defined through the service paradigm applied to a specific method fragment ? chunk. A discussion on the possibility to develop a unique representation of method fragment completes our contribution

A Classification Model for Reusable Software Components

TIris paper presents work which has been carried out in the ESF-ROSE project (referred to as ROSE in the remainder of this paper). Funded under the Eureka programme (Eureka is the famous interjection used by Archimedes in his bath and not an acronym), the ESF project (Eureka Software Factory) aims at providing a highly effective software manufacturing environment The use of the wordfactory in the software context has very little connection to traditional assemblyline factories. Instead, a Software Factory is a factory in the modem sense providing Computer Integrated Software Manufacturing with emphasis on integration. A software factory covers the total software production process, including all technical and managerial tasks, with a high degree of automation and resource utilization. The ROSE project is a collaborative effon involving MATRA Espace, the software house Serna Group (France), and the University of Dortmund (Federal Republic of Gennany). Pan of the work on classification is the Ph.D. research of author Eric Rames. The main goals of the ROSE project (Reuse Of SoftwarE) are: • to analyze and to define in a comprehensive way the concept of software reuse; • to develop an environment for the reuse of software components within a factory. A precondition for reuse in software development is the existence of libraries of reusable software components. In order to suppon reuse, the collection must contain not only the components themselves, but also be accessible by a system that provides descriptions of the components and retrieval mechanisms so that users may match their specific requirements against these descriptions. Indexing reusable software components according to a classification scheme allows reusers to have a better understanding and more efficient access to the libraries' contents. Therefore a classification scheme is built so that it represents selection criteria the reuser might have. These indexes would be searchable and keyed to retrievable software descriptions. Based on retrievals, users may then access the actual software. Building such a collection is a domain analysis process [PRI90] that includes activities such as: • Identification of software components that should be reusable and description in terms of reusable software components. • Definition of a classification scheme appropriate for indexing and retrieving the reusable software components. TIris paper focuses on the latter topic and how it is performed in the ROSE project. A case study carried out from the aerospace domain is then presented. A discussion of ongoing and future work will conclude this paper

Generating target system specifications from a domain model using CLIPS

The quest for reuse in software engineering is still being pursued and researchers are actively investigating the domain modeling approach to software construction. There are several domain modeling efforts reported in the literature and they all agree that the components that are generated from domain modeling are more conducive to reuse. Once a domain model is created, several target systems can be generated by tailoring the domain model or by evolving the domain model and then tailoring it according to the specified requirements. This paper presents the Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle (EDLC) paradigm in which a domain model is created using multiple views, namely, aggregation hierarchy, generalization/specialization hierarchies, object communication diagrams and state transition diagrams. The architecture of the Knowledge Based Requirements Elicitation Tool (KBRET) which is used to generate target system specifications is also presented. The preliminary version of KBRET is implemented in the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS)