Excerpts from the Introduction:

Since the time that software development started to be discussed within the industry, researchers and practitioners have been searching for methods, techniques and tools that would allow for improvements in costs, time-to-market and quality. Thus, an envisioned scenario was that managers, analysts, architects, developers and testers would avoid performing the same activities over and over, i.e., a set of reusable assets would be used to solve recurring problems. In this way, costs would be decreased, because the time that would have been necessary to repeat an activity could be invested in others relevant tasks.

The final objective envisioned in this scenario was very clear: to make something once and to reuse it several times. Thus, the people involved with software development started to explore the idea of reuse, in which experience, design, and, primarily, source code, could be copied from its original context to be reused in a new situation. The first efforts rendered successful stories, which helped to spread the principles of software reuse. The benefits, however, were being mostly achieved in an ad-hoc or opportunistic fashion. It was not clear why reuse was being achieved and, more importantly, how to achieve it again in other scenarios.

What was needed now was something more systematic and repeatable. Something based on defined processes and rules, so-called systematic reuse

Systematic software reuse is a technique that is employed to address the need for the improvement of software development quality and efficiency, without relying on individual initiative or luck! The objective here was still to reuse all forms of proven experience, including products and processes, as well as quality and productivity models. This rather than create everything anew each time. However, the focus was to provide organizations and managers a way to promote reuse with a greater degree of success.

The goal of this book is to present and discuss the state-of-the-art of software reuse. Methods, techniques and tools, whose main goal is to perform systematic software reuse in industrial environment, are described and discussed.

Intended Audience:

The book is for those people who are interested in the principles of software reuse and its related aspects. It is based upon the foundations of software reuse and provides experience and research-based knowledge.

We have written the book for practitioners, software reuse researchers, professors and students alike.