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1992-04-05
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[12pt] article
A National Infrastructure for Defense Reuse
James W. Moore
IBM Federal Sector Division
Gaithersburg, MD 20879
(301) 240-7843
moorej@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu
Position
Interest in software reuse is not confined to the Department of
Defense; commercial industry is vigorously pursuing such
techniques. There are, however, some problems specific to
defense reuse. For example, there is a difference in scale; few
commercial programs require the combination of size, reliability
and responsiveness that characterizes many defense programs.
Perhaps most importantly, though, there are comparatively few
opportunities for defense reuse. Few similar defense systems are
started within any short period of time and the development of
those systems may be awarded to different contractors. This
means that effective defense reuse must be done across company
boundaries rather than within a particular company. Coping with
this characteristic requires the development of a national,
inter-company infrastructure for the preservation and
presentation of reusable software assets.
The Army's RAPID (Reusable Ada Products for Information Systems
Development) reuse library ,
and similar programs have
performed pioneering work in setting up operational libraries to
provide reusable assets to local communities of users who share
requirements and values. A ``qualification'' or ``certificatio''n
process
applies these values to the screening of
candidate assets. The effectiveness of value-based qualification
is diminished, though, when applied outside of the community of
users who share those values. It seems unlikely that such an
approach can be scaled up to the national level.
The USAF CARDS (Central Archive for Reusable Defense Software)
program, chartered by congress to lay out a blueprint for DoD
software reuse, will take a different approach. This program is
initially focusing on domain specific reuse processes applicable
to command and control software. Knowledge from a fairly
rigorous domain analysis of command and control centers will be
tangibly expressed in a knowledge-base , resulting in a
generic architecture. Reusable components will be qualified on
the basis of their ``form, fit and function'' within the generic
architecture. This, in effect, permits the government to
``standardize'' upon the domain analysis and to create multiple
instances of command centers derived from the generic
architecture, thus achieving high levels of reuse.
Even rigorously structured domain-specific libraries like CARDS
will not lead to a single national reuse resource. With today's
reuse technology, there are simply too many unsolved problems to
select a single design point for solution. Even after the
problems are solved, there will still be a need for diversity
because different communities will specialize in different
application domains, will want different fee structures, and will
prefer different user interfaces and communications mechanisms.
Most importantly, though, institutionalization of software reuse
requires a cultural change where thousands of individuals will
have to make individual decisions to prefer reuse to new
development. The probability of a single design point appealing
to thousands of users is vanishingly small. Moreover, a
diversity of choices will provide an element of intellectual (and
perhaps commercial) competition which will ultimately have the
effect of reducing costs, improving services, and accelerating
technology infusion.
In order to present the resources of many different reuse
libraries to many different users, a national marketplace is
required. The DARPA ASSET (Asset Source for Software Engineering
Technology) program has the mission of providing this
marketplace. ASSET will perform the functions necessary to
create an interoperating network of reuse libraries so that any
user of any library will be able to access the services of all of
the libraries. ASSET would also serve any central coordination
functions such as the administration of schemes for nomenclature
and identification. ASSET is following a strategy of encouraging
the participation of private entrepreneurs to provide value-added
services in all aspects of its operation. By attracting a
variety of participants, it is hoped that the electronic
marketplace will become populated by a diverse set of producers
providing goods and services for a diverse set of consumers.
Of course, interoperability of reuse libraries requires some
level of standardization. A cooperative government/industry
consensus group, the Reuse Library Interoperability Group (RIG),
has been formed to draft and propose such standards. The group
hopes to identify and standardize well-understood technologies to
provide a stable base for value-added activities by the various
reuse library efforts. In its six months of existence, the RIG
has attracted twenty-three organizations as members, including
major corporations, government agencies, and reuse library
programs.
In looking to the future, we can see a ``reuse industry'' serving
local community (or intra-company) reuse libraries, domain-
specific libraries which cross corporate boundaries, and a
national infrastructure for sharing among libraries. The
national marketplace will be populated by providers of
components, value-added tools, consulting, and system
integration. All of the services will be delivered to end-users
via their local library.
nied91
Major Alvin Nieder, ``RAPID: Implementing a
Comprehensive Reuse Program,'' Joint DoD Software
Technology Symposium , Salt Lake City, UT, Apr 91.
Joanne C. Piper and Wanda L. Barner, ``The RAPID Center
Reusable Software Components (RSCs) Certification
Process,'' U.S. Army Information Systems Software
Development Center - Washingtoni, 1991.
James J. Solderitsch, Kurt C. Wallnau and John
Thalhamer, ``Constructing Domain-Specific Ada Reuse
Libraries,'' 7th Annual National Conference on Ada
Technology , 1989.