Using a Very High Level Language to Build Families of High Quality
Reusable Components
Gary F. Pollice
CenterLine Software, Inc. and
U. Massachusetts, Lowell
Abstract
While most programs are designed to perform a specific task, they have
a natural evolution over time; causing a single program to become a
set of programs that perform related tasks. In 1976 David Parnas
introduced the concept of a family of programs [11 ]. He suggests
that any program should be considered a member of a family of
programs, all of which perform related tasks. If one plans for change
when a program is designed less effort may be required to produce
future revisions. Today there is an emphasis on building software
components for reuse. Components may be designs, programs, functions,
classes, or code segments. Major reuse projects are in progress at
several institutions, for example, the Software Productivity
Consortium and the Software Engineering Institute [1,6]. Processes
have been developed to introduce and support reuse programs. The
disciplines of domain engineering and software synthesis emphasize
creating families of components and developing tools to assist in
constructing them. Component generation is a prominent part of most
efforts.
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