The call for improved software quality and productivity and reduced development and maintenance costs has become a familiar battle cry, used to justify an ever-expanding number and variety of increasingly specialized disciplines, methods and tools: data administration, business process reengineering, business reengineering, information engineering, object orientation, and domain analysis, to name but a few. Although some of these disciplines did not originally focus on reuse, each is gradually coming to recognize that reuse is central to their efforts to improve software quality and productivity.
However, professionals in any of these disciplines often work with little understanding or connection to the others. Therefore we are unable to collaborate on our separate contributions to the same underlying problems. As a result, we are far from agreement on how to achieve reuse, or even what reuse means.
Ideally, to realize the promised benefits of reuse adoption, an alliance should be arranged between the relevant disciplines. This paper is proposing to start this alliance with an arranged marriage of Domain Analysis (DA) and Information Engineering (IE). It discusses the "stovepipe domain" problems that this marriage would solve. It describes the common and complementary traits of both "parties" that should lead to marital success. Finally, it explains why the religious centers of semantic modeling and/or object orientation, which represent a set of values and practices already shared to some extent by DA and IE, may offer an ideal support framework for this marriage.
Keywords:
reuse, reuse planning, domain analysis, information
engineering, interoperability, domain scoping, stovepipe domains,
component, variant
Workshop Goals:
Exchange of ideas and experiences with other
researchers and practitioners; brokering the marriage proposed
above.
Working Groups:
Reuse, integration, and interoperability
(suggestion); Reuse management, organization and economics;
Domain analysis and engineering; Reuse and OO methods