Summary and Conclusions

In summary, our working group had a fascinating series of short discussions dealing with mental models, micro-architecture issues, and cross-cultural issues. These discussions led us to the following conclusions:

• Every system involves micro-architectural commitments, but if one decides not to think about them beforehand, they may not give any leverage.
• An important question: ``Twenty years from now, what do we want the ``legacy code'' we're stuck with to look like?'' We're writing that code today---what should the reuse community advise about current practices?
• Architectural commitments are all about giving up some flexibility (system-wide) to buy (hopefully lots of) system-wide leverage.

We concluded by providing a list of techniques for thinking about mental models and their representations, and for generalizing components. This report is also available in the WISR archive (URL: http://www.umcs.maine.edu/ ftp/wisr/wisr.html), along with URL links to a number of references.