Over the past few years, IT and business organizations have been engaged in an informal kind of reuse through code sharing, design patterns, etc. However, the systematic reuse of software components across multiple applications and projects is in its infancy. The reason is that a wide variety of obstacles are faced in making the transition from the traditional software development approach to component-based enterprise software development. To overcome those obstacles, several engineering, process-related, organizational, and business-oriented issues should be addressed. The following obstacles are typically cited:

• Business-oriented issues concerning how component development and support should be funded, lack of funding for education, training, access to vendor-supplied components, lack of a convincing business case and economic model for long term investment, unclear definition of product-line model and features, etc.
• Process-related issues due to low process maturity of the organization, ill-defined or unfamiliar reuse-oriented methods and processes, new inter-group coordination and management needs, and well tested and documented methods and models to relate features to component sets and variability, etc.
• Organizational issues due to the lack of a systematic practice for reuse activities and enterprise component development, lack of management expertise and support, etc.
• Engineering issues mainly due to the lack of adequate techniques and tools for identifying, designing, documenting, testing, packaging, categorizing, and integration of reusable software components, too few and poorly understood standard patterns and architectures, COTS integration, etc.
• Infrastructure issues due to the lack of widespread use of a standardized design notation such as the UML, common tools, base components, different programming languages and environments, support for multi-group configuration management, etc.

Organizers:

Martin Griss, Ph.D., Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Email: griss@hpl.hp.com

Gilda Pour, Ph.D., San Jose State University

John Favaro, Intecs Sistemi