A process for transforming portions of existing software for reuse in modern development approaches

As development costs spiral upwards, creating ever more complex systems from scratch seems implausable. Component-based development offers the potential to tackle this issue through reuse. However, this approach must accommodate the exploitation of the embedded knowledge that already exists in non-component-based code. This paper proposes an extension to the software reconnaissance technique [15] that identi es reusable code within existing software systems. Once identi ed, the report shows how this code can be transformed for use within a component-based development paradigm

ESCAPE meta modeling in software engineering:when premature commitment is useful in representations

This paper introduces, and provides a cognitive basis for, a prototype meta-modeling process called ESCAPE. This process involves users explicitly stating their own model of an entity of interest, CAPturing an alternative or correct model of that entity and consequently re-Evaluating their own model. The paper shows the model’s implicit, but already well established, use in the software engineering domain. In particular, it focuses on empirical work carried out in Software Understanding and Architectural Recovery of large commercial software systems using the Reflexion modeling process, which embodies ESCAPE meta-modeling principles. Finally, it suggests several areas where ESCAPE meta-modeling could be beneficially applied in software engineeri

Achieving a reuse perspective within a component recovery process: an industrial scale case study

Identifying elements of existing software that are reused within a system may provide maintainers with valuable insights during system evolution. This paper evaluates an extension of software reconnaissance that can be used to analyse reuse across features in a system, as part of a component recovery process proposed in [18]. We illustrate and evaluate retrieval of reuse information in this fashion using a large, commercial ERP and warehousing application. Results suggest that the approach scales well in terms of reuse information across features in existing software, providing maintainers with a valuable new perspective on the software system in question

An experiential report on the limitations of experimentation as a means of empirically investigating software practitioners.

This paper outlines the needs for careful empirical-design choices during the study of software practitioners. It does this by presenting a documented, but unpublished, in-vivo, empirical, group study. The study was initially conceived as an experiment but was subsequently overwhelmed by human and other factors. As a consequence, only more observational comments could be derived from the study. In this paper, the study is analyzed and discussed, as a means of illustrating the conflict that often exists between in-vivo empirical studies and the experimental paradigm