Reuse engineering: software construction from reusable components

The authors describe a comprehensive approach that supports reuse in the software development process, especially the production of software from reusable components. For this purpose well-known strategies like reverse engineering and design recovery are combined with a generalization mechanism to develop the reuse engineering process. This process includes both the phase of isolating reusable modules from existing software and the phase of retrieving such modules from a software component library and combining them to new software. The definition of a reuse engineering life-cycle, which integrates reuse into the conventional software life-cycle is considered.<>