Determining Software’s Industrial Paradigm—Reuse Practice
Peter Middleton, James Sutton · Productivity Press eBooks · 2020
Reuse in its various forms has leveraged everything that producers create: code, design, requirements, processes, tools, environments, procedures, and even human knowledge and experience. Craft producers of software, like their counterparts in other industries, believe that their products are so unique that only highly skilled artisans can produce them. Craft-paradigm software reuse therefore focuses on reusing the knowledge of programmers as well as pieces of existing systems, verbatim or nearly so. Perhaps because the most important principle of mass production is efficiency, mass software producers look first for reuse approaches that improve efficiency. In the library approach, software components are collected and placed into libraries, often by mining the components directly from previous software programs. Software systems are considered to be within the same domain if they perform roughly the same kind of overall mission in meeting the needs of real customers. Lean reuse is also domain-based, but with important differences.