The microcomponent and its extension patterns for flexible reuse of software artifacts

Abstract

Software reuse is a strategic approach for increasing productivity and improving quality of software development. The software reuse can be done with every type of software artifacts like source code, design document and so on. However, software engineers often have difficulty in reusing the artifacts, because finding reusable component is time consuming and hard activity: Software engineers, in many cases, have to retrieve the contents of reusable artifact more than one time, and also find the reusable fragment from whole content. The microComponent is one of solution to support fragment-based reuse of software artifacts. This paper proposes the fundamentals of the microComponent and how to support the reuse of the microComponents. Especially we define extension patterns to enhance the flexibility of the microComponent reuse. Our proposition may give such benefits of reducing the effort and time to find reusable components and increasing the reusability of software artifacts, eventually.