Practical software reuse: an interim report

Reuse in software has been discussed at length in the community with a variety of techniques and varying rates of success. We take a slightly longer range view and present an eight year experience report. The software discussed in this paper include some well known tools with a very large user base both inside and outside our company. The assumptions under which work was done here were: users could choose between our work and the free market, reused items will have dynamic life cycles, and a consistent and stable system architecture was vital. A lesson learnt was that a configuration and distribution process oriented to software product control and delivery provides, with some augmentation, an effective base for reuse support. Having a process-oriented software base constantly enhanced with customer feedback has promoted a high degree of reuse of our software