A multimodeling framework for complex software reuse

Software reuse is a complex subject that is highly knowledge-intensive. The study of software reuse must focus not only on the problems related to developing reusable components, but also the problems that incorporate previously defined reusable components. To address these overall complexity problems, this paper first identifies four complexity issues for the engineering of large-scale software reuse: acquisition, classification, representation, and retrieval. A multimodeling framework is proposed where each component is defined via four different generic models. Incorporating all of these models into a single reuse framework allows the users to focus on their particular viewpoint and, therefore, provide a single system that directly addresses the complexity issues associated with reuse. The development of this proposed framework has been implemented in a proof-of-concept reuse system prototype.