Software Reuse

A "software crisis" occurs where the gap between the demand for new complex software systems and the actual supply has rapidly increased. This book argues that reusing software can be a major factor in alleviating these problems. The text covers the principles, approaches, support systems, methodologies and real cases in software reuse practice. It discusses the implications of reuse for the software life-cycle and the concerns of sofware engineering and management. It also considers organization issues: retrieval specification and the reorganization of components. Document-oriented versus object-oriented approaches to reuse are described in detail. Legal issues are discussed with relation to both patent and copyright law. The main emphasis of this work is on domain analysis as a fundamental method for creating real reusable components. It explains how domain analysis works by studying existing software systems, emerging technology and the developments in terminology and then building domain models or classification schemes for software according to that compiled information.