Researches On Component-based Software Reuse Technology

Over the past several decades, software productivity has been steadily increasing but still not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver. A lot of intensive research in software engineering and artificial intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only) realistic approach to bring about the productivity and quality that the software industry needs. What is more, software reuse offers a great deal of potential in terms of reducing the cost and improving the quality of software development. There are two kinds of technical way to practice software reuse. One is based on the automation achieved with application generators and the other on the composition of reuse assets or components. Far more attention is put on the latter according to many recent publications on software reuse, partly because of the maturing of a new paradigm, Object-Orientation (00) technology, which is an enabling technology for developing reusable components. But up to now, there are still some problems to be solved on component-based software reuse, such as lack of vulgate models and management tools of reusable components. In this thesis, a review and summary of software reuse technology is given in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, a visual Object-Oriented reusable component model developed by the author is presented, which extends the classical MVC model and is implemented by a group of collaborative objects. The needs must be met when the model is realized and the possibility of its implementation in a few popular OOPLs are also discussed in detail. Furthermore, a storage model of reusable components and the architecture of component repositories are designed, based on which a prototype repository has been built as well. In the two following chapters, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, some component management issues are discussed, such as matching, retrieval, browsing and reuse metrics, with emphasis on a formal specification matching algorithm and a reusability metrics model, respectively. Finally, in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, two newcome problems irrelative to component-based software reuse are introduced. What have been done and what to be done by the author in the future brings this thesis to the end.