Reuse: the two concurrent life cycles paradigm

ABSTRACT

Since its introduction, Ada has held out the promise of significant productivity gains resulting from the ability to reuse design and code components more effectively. However, these gains will not occur simply because of the powerful features of the language or the good intentions of the Ada software engineers. The search for dramatic productivity increases will require considerable up-front investment and will need to be carefully focused and planned. This paper offers a paradigm of two concurrent life cycles to establish the groundwork for effectively employing reusable products to develop application systems. The model identifies a “Generic Product Development Life Cycle” to develop reusable products for a selected application domain. This life cycle runs before and concurrently with the “Application-Specific Product Development Life Cycle” which makes use of general purpose and domain-specific reusable products to develop applications. The “Generic Product Development Life Cycle” is concerned with creating, reworking and/or acquiring the reusable assets necessary to support application development. The resulting assets would include such things as domain models, specifications of common domain problems to be solved (specification of recurring patterns), generic architectures to address those problems, process models and Ada software components. The motivation for a generic products development process results from the realization that reuse requires a well-defined domain focus [PRIETO-DIAZ-90], careful planning outside the scope of any specific application development and an investment in the domain.

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