Workshop on Quality Assurance in Reuse Contexts

Abstract

The systematic, large-scale reuse of software development artifacts over multiple products is a promising approach to address today’s software development problems and to make the development process more efficient. Recently, reuse-based software development paradigms such as component-based development and software product lines have increasingly received attention as they promise—and have shown—to shorten the development time of software systems and to reduce development and maintenance costs. To achieve the promised improvements, however, high-quality artifacts intended for reuse are required. Thus, more than for traditional software development, quality assurance becomes a crucial part of every reuse-based development effort. However, a number of specifics caused by software reuse (such as the variable usage of components or genericity of artifacts) must be faced during quality assurance. To enable an organization to fully experience the expected efficiency gain through reuse, therefore, a quality assurance approach is required that enables the validation of products built from reusable artifacts as effective and as efficient in a non-reuse context.