A reusability-based software development environment

Abstract

Software reuse has great potential to improve software development productivity. However, it has had only limited success in practice. This is because that there are non technical factors as well technical ones affecting software reusability. This paper discusses some problems related to software reuse, analyzes some technical supports for software reuse, and introduces a reusability-based software development system which has been prototyped and is under further improvement. The prominent features of the system include: allowing programmers dynamically to put tested working program components (including data objects created at run-times) into the reusable software library, helping programmers produce software specifications, automatically searching for the required components according to users' queries, assisting users to make a query, and allowing users to select the retrieved components and browse their specifications.