Practical guidelines for Ada reuse in an industrial environment

Abstract

An essential pre-requisite for widespread software reuse is a significant base of reusable components at different levels of abstraction. The construction of such a component base is simplified if components are developed, in the first place, to be as reusable as possible. Although there have been a number of studies of guidelines for producing reusable Ada components, we have found that these are too vague and general for practical application in an industrial setting. This paper will discuss part of the work going on in a technology transfer (ESSI) project called APPRAISAL. We are addressing the need for simple, practical reuse guidelines which can be applied without significantly increasing development costs. We describe some of these guidelines and the rationale for their development. We discuss requirements for reuse information dissemination and explain how World-Wide Web (WWW) browsers satisfy these requirements.