Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Software Reuse and Product Lines

摘要

Reusing software is as close to a silver bullet as one can probably get in software engineering [1], simply for the reason that the strongest increase in productivity will come from avoiding the development of software in the first place. Ever, since the vision of components, which would be developed once and then reused a number of times, was established by Mcllroy in 1968 [2], there was a strong interest in the topic of software reuse. Since then it had a history with many ups and downs. Many of the early efforts were not met with the success that was expected: too often components were developed for reuse without gaining the expected return on investment from this. As we know now, often the major problem was a strong focus on code reuse and other technical issues, without giving sufficient attention to higher-level artifacts. Also early opportunistic approaches did not sufficiently address that reusable components must fit to the context (e.g., architecture) in which reuse is expected to happen.