The goal of this group was to explore the hypothesis that high-payoff hybrid reuse can be systematically addressed in the form of domain-specific kits, and that appropriate methods and technology should be developed to support this integrated approach to delivering reuse.
The leaders first described HP's notion of a kit, meant to be the ``complete'' and ``coherent'' packaging and delivery of (several different) reusable work products to simplify application building. A kit is comprised of compatible, domain-specific frameworks, components, glue language and supporting tools. The notion of ``hybrid kits'' was discussed in the domain-engineering WG at WISR'92. We built on this work by describing kit ``style'' as ranging from purely compositional to purely generative. We identified hybrid reuse, combining compositional and generative reuse, as having the greatest payoff. In this mode, generators and builders can be used to produce a variety of workproducts (such as the glue language, parameters for components, customized components, and data-tables).
We illustrated the concept and range of kits styles by discussion the Calculator Construction Kit and a prototype HP labs software-bus based kit for Task-list management. The group discussed the notions of frameworks, components and glue languages, which workproducts could be reusable, where to place the domain-specificity, and the differences between generators (automated generation or configuration from specifications) and builders (graphical tools to aid in manual composition of components).