Issues in the Certification
of Reusable Parts

John C. Knight
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
Thornton Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22903

knight@virginia.edu

Abstract:

A substantial difficulties that is limiting reuse is a lack of perceived quality in the artifacts being reused. Availability of a part with suitable functionality is not sufficient if the prospective user does not trust the part and refuses to use it as a result. We present a definition of certification to deal with this situation and propose to exploit this definition to permit savings during testing and maintenance.




Keywords: software reuse, part certification, software reliability