Software Artefacts as Equipment: A New Conception to Software Development using Reusable Software Artefacts Research-in-Progress

摘要

Through the lens of Heidegger's analysis of equipment, this study observes 'software reuse' - a popular phenomenon in the world. It presents an alternative conceptual view of the software artefact as 'equipment'. This view provides a theoretical underpinning to this prominent practice to recognize software artefacts, as equipment. Employing the case study method, this study reports preliminary results of five software development projects to investigate the development and reusability of software artefacts. Two types of generalizability were identified: 1) horizontal generalizability, and 2) vertical generalizability. From the results it can be inferred that reusability of software artefacts may depend on the type of generalizability. The level of reusability of software artefacts may increase the level of maturity of software artefacts. Furthermore, the results indicated that the software artefacts were updated rapidly in the initial stages, compared to final stages of software development life cycle.