Software Re-use, Utrecht 1989

This volume contains the papers (revised after the workshop had taken place), together with the reports of the parallel sessions, from the Software Re-use Workshop, held in Utrecht from 23-24 November 1989. Members of the leading research teams from Europe were invited to the workshop to present short papers. The various researchers approaches were debated in the parallel sessions: on domain analysis, on component engineering (including reverse engineering), and on the development of software from re-usable components. Re-use of software may be defined as a means to support the construction of new programs using, in a systematic way, existing designs, design fragments, program texts, documentation, or other forms of program representation. This excludes porting and maintenance because these activities are based on keeping the same software in a changing (hardware or software) environment. Software re-use is sometimes regarded as a solution to the "software crisis", by both improving software quality and reducing costs and timescales. However, although the idea is simple, there are technical problems to be overcome, including: standard de scription of components, methods for generic components, use for reverse engineering, library organisation for easy retrieval, methods for design using coponents, and how to use knowledge of the underlying domains. The book starts with an introduction to software re-use, and has a comprehensive bibliography merged from those accumulated at Delft and Brunel. The book provides an excellent state-of-the-art summary of software re-use, which will be of interest to software engineers and postgraduate students who need a rapid introduc- tion to software re-use and its main research issues, together with the results of current research from teams across Europe.