On developing a repository structure tailored for reuse with improvement

Abstract

Learning from experience gained in past projects is seen as a promising way to improve software quality in upcoming projects. Thus, reusing components to support software development is widely accepted in research and industry. Some approaches even require not only the reuse of (directly) reusable components, but, for instance, the reuse of techniques, methods, tools, processes, or even metrics. This calls for a repository that organizes all kinds of reusable elements and offers them, on demand, to the (re-)user in accordance with the applied reuse processes. Furthermore, such a repository should also support processes to learn about, and improve, the quality of its stored artifacts. This paper describes how a comprehensive reuse repository is developed and tailored for an organization. The discussion is detailed by an example, namely the development of the SFB 501 repository at the University of Kaiserslautern. Resulting structures and aspects of the implementation are discussed.