Software resue: Issues and an example

Reusability is a general principle that is instrumental in avoiding duplication and capturing commonality in inherently similar tasks. It simplifies and unifies classes of phenomena and is the basis for economic justification for developing reusable software products that make computers and programmers more productive. This paper provides an overview of some of the major issues in reuse combined with practical experience based on a case study of reuse in the telecommunications industry: a project of moderate complexity on signaling link provisioning that was carried out at AT&T Bell Labs. The project incorporates reuse into the prototyping paradigm. The benefits of reuse are quantified, and their effect on productivity is shown. In addition, a simple and effective intelligent reuse support system, based on concepts of rule based expert systems and relational databases, is detailed for use as a meta-language interface for automatic code (skeleton) generation. The case illustrates many significant aspects associated with the integration of reuse in information systems development.