Reuse Infrastructure Development

Reuse infrastructure development refers to the creation and maintenance of organizational, educational, and technology infrastructure to support reuse.

• Organizational infrastructure includes three critical elements: people, processes, and organizations tailored for reuse. People with the necessary reuse training are the most critical element. The necessary reuse knowledge includes both knowledge of general reuse practices, as well as specific knowledge on how to use particular reusable assets. Within the ``Customer /1 IP team'', knowledge of how to utilize the asset is concentrated in a small number of people. Training of additional people is done as part of engagements using the asset. There is no significant effort to develop more general knowledge about how to perform reuse in the general case.

  Ideally, the organizational element should be configured to maximize effective reuse. This is best achieved by separating the creation and enhancement portions of the organization from the utilization portions. Though this may not always be achievable it is at least important that individuals understands what role they are performing at any given time. In the case of Customer /1 IP, only utilization roles are defined. Creation and enhancement is not addressed.

• Educational infrastructure refers to the capability to train people in the necessary skills for building and using reusable assets, as well as the overall reuse center development process. Customer /1 IP only addresses the later as part of on the job training while working within an engagement using the asset.

• Technology infrastructure includes various technologies which can aid reuse. This often includes: a repository of some sort, technology for packaging assets (e.g., ways of representing deliverables, specific tools, and process formalizations). Within Customer/1 IP, there is no special reuse technology infrastructure. Of particular note, the repository in which Customer/1 is delivered is the same one used in its initial creation. This has the advantage of bundling all of the various work- objects generated as part of the initial engagement. The disadvantage of this repository is that it is a repository intended only to support the development of a single system. The Recommendations section will elaborate on this point.