www.btinternet.com/~adrian.larner/review/schaefer
Software Reusability
Wilhelm Schäfer, Rubén Prieto-díaz, and Masao Matsumoto (Eds)
Ellis Horwood, 1994, 160pp, hardbound, £29.95
ISBN 0 13 063918 4
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
This is the book, but not exactly the proceedings, of the 1st International Workshop on Software Reusability, held in Dortmund in 1991. “Instead of just publishing the accepted ... papers, the editors ... decided to try to produce a more coherent result.... [to] present the major stream[s] of discussions and ... [to] cover particular aspect[s] ... in more technical depth or give clarifying examples.... [T]his ... produced a[n] ... exhaustive coverage of ... research in software reusability.”
There are six chapters (numbers of references in parentheses): An historical overview, with a convenient research framework (39); Domain analysis methods, of which eight are described, compared, contrasted, and evaluated (36); Managerial and organisational issues, with a brief survey of international practice and less brief consideration of many issues (66); Formal methods, with three formalisms described (62); Tools and environments, with three specific environments described (41); and Empirical studies - a brief framework proposal (11).
Most welcome, perhaps because unexpected, is the chapter on formal methods. What, after all, are more reused than the standard solutions and methods of logic and mathematics? “[R]euse provides the economic foundation for the use of formal methods; the iterated use of knowledge amortizes the higher development costs raised by its formal description.”
This was a delight:
real sense and hard thought about re-use.
“This book”, says the blurb, “will be appropriate for researchers, postgraduates ...” And so it will. If you are researching in software reuse, this is the place to start. “... final year undergraduates in software engineering and computer science.” Well, perhaps just a teeny bit turgid for some of them. But add to that list of readers: the purveyors of facile arguments that the latest silver bullet will deliver reuse (I name no names). Reusability is not merely, not even principally, “of components in composite structures”: it is “of resources in performing a task”; indeed “of everything associated with a software project including knowledge”. And the “managerial, economic, social, cultural, and legal ... problems are as important [as], and more difficult to solve than, the technical problems.”
Expensive for a slim volume? But iterated reference to it will amortize the acquisition cost.
Copyright © 1995, 2001 Adrian Larner. The author asserts all moral rights.
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