“Reuse” and “hybrid systems” working groups summary---SETA2 working groups 2 and 6

Abstract

The original working group organization plan for the Second International Symposium o n Environments and Tools for Ada had seven Working Groups, two of which were "Making Reus e Happen", chaired by Teri Payton, and "Hybrid System Building", chaired by Fred MaymirDucharme . But as the membership of the Working Groups coalesced at the Symposium, it becam e clear that there was a significant overlap of both interest and topics between those two workin g groups . It was quickly decided to combine them ; the following is a summary report of the join t Reuse/Hybrid Working Group results and recommendations .The Working Group chose to focus on two main aspects of reuse that were applicable equally bot h to hybrid and to homogeneous systems :• attributes and assessment criteria of (hybrid) reusable components, associated with a se t of reuse categories developed in the discussio n • software engineering environment support required for each category, to facilitate creation and incorporation of reusable productsDuring the working group sessions, a number of fundamental reuse classification categories wer e put forward for discussion purposes, and the working group came up with attributes an d environment support requirements for each . The group found sufficient overlapping among th e categories to warrant collapsing the list, eliminating some of the original categories . The resultin g ten fundamental reuse classification categories identified by the working group were :• black box (unmodifiable/unmodified), including commercial off-the-shelf (COTS ) software component s • white box (modifiable) -including "harvesting", "mining", "scavenging", and othe r informal forms of reus e • object-code libraries (callable) -frequent in hybrid system s • requirements-based generation (production) of asset s • domain-specific application generator s portin g • (domain-specific) architecture-based -these might be components with commo n interfaces, or reuse might be within a family of systems or a family of requirement s constrained interconnection of building blocks -where composition rules o r conventions for usage have been defined • reverse engineering -inferring requirements/design information from existing cod e • re-engineering -constructing (new) code based on reverse engineerin g The STARS Conceptual Framework for Reuse Processes was presented and the group agreed tha t this was a useful organizing element for our work. The framework identifies 4 families of reus e processes : reuse planning, asset creation, asset management and asset utilization . The group reviewed the environment support requirements for each of the classification categories that ha d