Revised Kit Process

The discussion on the kit development and use process lead to several observations and some suggested modifications:

• DA constrains kit analysis/design.
• KA constrains domain design.
• Some methods of DA/DE include parts of KE.
• Distinction between DE and KE is fuzzy. What are some distinct work products?

The working group suggested that there was so little independence in implementation that separating kit and domain implementation may not make sense. The constraint observation lead to a new model of development in which Domain Analysis and Kit analysis overlap, both affecting kit and domain design then merging in implementation.

Conclusions

• Kit Taxonomy table was useful to collect and analyze cases.
• Developers could use a table like this to suggest extra elements in kits.
• Seems like KE/DE separation has validity. (There are distinct, yet interrelated WP and processes.)

Next Steps

• Kit Taxonomy
  • collect and analyze additional kits.
  • do DA like analysis of kits.
  • refine as a reference model.
  • use to find design rules/criteria (for particular reuse scenarios).
  • develop kit glossary, with terms such as ``kit'', ``framework'', ``domain''.

• Kit Process
  • define distinct WP of Domain Engineering and Kit Engineering.
  • identify steps in domain analysis/engineering process(es) as part of DE/KE.

• Overall
  • link Taxonomy & Process to relate to kit design.

Questions and suggestions when the final results were presented at the plenary included:

• Need to look at several different kinds of systems.
• Are kits distinct from Application Generators or Generic Architectures?
• Why distinguish DE/KE?
• Look at Ed Berard view on Kits, because he used the term before.