Reusable Software Development

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The quality and reliability of software today is expected to be extremely high. Software is being included in engines of automobiles, robots, x-ray machines at hospitals; it is no surprise that software is expected to operate correctly almost all the time. This reliability comes at a cost of increasing complexity. With the increase in complexity, software development teams are getting larger and maintenance is becoming more difficult. Although developers are dealing with these problems project dates are still very rigorous and projects can seem impossible to complete on time. Due to these problems, software development costs are rising which is increasing the cost of software for consumers. Without new practices to develop software these costs will continue to rise and profits will continue to fall. Software reuse can help shape the future of software development. Much of the cost and effort for software engineering come from the continual re-discovery and re-invention of patterns and components developed throughout the software industry. By using a repository developers can upload assets to a shared library for themselves or others to use at a later time. Assets can be anything used during the development process such as documentation, designs, components, knowledge base and source code. Using these shared repositories developers can prevent ‘reinventing the wheel’ and focus their efforts on new problems instead of ones that have been solved countless times before. The purpose of this paper is to discuss software reuse and the technologies used to share them and why software reuse isn’t living up to its reputation. If assets have already been developed for a particular scenario there shouldn’t be a reason to ‘rein... ... middle of paper ... ...elopment methods for an increase in their quality, productivity, and lower maintenance costs. References Works Cited Desouza, Kevin. “Four Dynamics for Bringing Reuse Back into Software Reuse.” Communication in ACM. Vol 49 No 1. January 2005. Jordan, Kimberly. Software Reuse Term Paper. 1997. Schmidt, Douglas. “Why Software Reuse has Failed and How to Make It Work for You.” C++ Report Magazine. January 1999. Sommerville, Ian. Software Engineering 8. Addison-Wesley Publishers, 2007 “Code Reuse.” Wikipedia, The Free Encylopedia. 28 Mar 2007, 19:35 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 April 2007 “Hidden Costs of Code Reuse.” Information Week. 9 Nov, 1998. 14 April 2007

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