Issues concerning software reuse-in-the-large

Software reuse is the reapplication of artifacts and knowledge from the development of one system to another system, in order to reduce the effort of software development and maintenance of that other system. Software reuse can be classified in different ways according to different views. The authors view is that to classify software reuse in reuse-in-the-small and reuse-in-the-large is useful. After comparing the techniques which can be applied to these two kinds of reuse respectively, they are convinced that reuse-in-the-small is fundamentally limited by its inherent lack of information about improving the whole process of software development and maintenance. They believe that, these limitations can be overcome by applying reuse-in-the-large which, therefore, is more likely to be a challenge to solve the software crisis and will continue to be a hot topic in the near future. The authors describe what software reuse is, why it is necessary, how it can be achieved, current achievements, research problems and their future work.<>