To foster the necessary commitment and facilitate software reuse at Motorola, the Reuse Task Force proposed a Reuse Working Group (RWG) whose main task is to provide the development and subsequent communication of reuse guidelines/standards to software engineers and their management.
In general terms the charter of the Reuse Working Group is to implement guidelines and recommended practices for software reuse within Motorola. As stated by the Reuse Task Force: "We must determine an optimal reuse process and control it via the use of metrics. We must allow for the knowledge gained in one area to be available to the developer who needs it in another. We must develop a paradigm for development that formally makes use of what we already know - we must FORMALLY REUSE." These high level abstract goals are being expanded into a detailed process by the RWG.
The RWG consists of a group of engineers who are working together to develop a best-in-class reuse program. The group must represent all of the Motorola software community. Each member of the RWG has become the reuse champion for his/her location and targeted projects for potential reuse. Thus the reuse program at Motorola is a bottom-up implementation. Cooperation, coordination, and communication are the three most important elements in the group.
The RWG's primary interests are education, guidelines, technology, and implementation of software reuse at Motorola. However, the group has determined that education is the most important activity and without it the others will not come to fruition. Therefore, the group has dedicated its initial efforts to the indoctrination and training of software engineers and their management. The RWG is facilitating this through an aggressive seminar and workshop program for software reuse.
Seminars are a quick way to introduce people to the basics of reuse. The informal seminars are being used to establish common terminology and definitions, and to discuss the concepts of a reuse organization and what part it will play in software development. Once Motorola has reached a consistent level of reuse knowledge, seminars will become a forum for external reuse experts and researchers.
Training workshops provide instruction on the development and use of reusable components and the operation of the reuse organization. There will be a series of training workshops: object- oriented design, reuse for software engineers, and reuse for software engineering managers. The group is developing workshops under the guidance of a subject matter expert(s).
Additionally, Motorola reuse conferences are being held in conjunction with other internal software conferences (e.g.,the Object Oriented conference).