Organizations often overreach when trying to adopt reuse. They try to institute reuse visions that are too complex, in whole or in part, for the knowledge and skills they possess. This paper proposes that reuse processes be defined as families, with precisely-defined commonalities and variations, and that the variations be chosen such that some family members are suited to organizations just learning reuse, whereas others are for organizations with much reuse experience. This is illustrated using the Synthesis process family. The paper presents some of Synthesis' commonalities and variabilities, then delineates how two members—one for advanced organizations, another for those new to reuse—resolve the variabilities. Comparing the two leads to some insights on how one's ultimate reuse goals might be relaxed to accommodate current practice.
Keywords:
Software reuse, software development process,
family, process family, domain engineering.
Workshop Goals:
Validate problem and solution based on experiences of other researchers;
understand domain analysis/engineering in family-oriented terms.
Working Groups:
Domain analysis/engineering,
reuse process models, reuse maturity models.