Representing Technology to Promote Reuse in 
the Software Design Process






Reuse Metrics, Software Design, Component Archive, Technology 
Specification


Component based software engineering has been 
perceived to have immense reuse potential. This 
area has evoked wide interest and has 
led to considerable investment in research and 
development efforts. However, it is unclear as 
to how much component reuse has actually 
been achieved. Though, the C++ standard template 
library has popularized the reuse of generic 
algorithms and data structures, the software architecture 
community has been promoting a higher level 
approach to software reuse for many years, 
to further enhance productivity in the software 
design and development process. Leveraging a well-defined, 
implementation-independent reference architecture that captures the functional, 
data, and timing requirements inherent to a 
given domain, this research specifies technology components 
(e.g. application software) according to the technologyís 
coverage and compliance to both the reference 
architecture structure and the requirements defined therein. 
Additionally, the research exploits the separation of 
domain functional requirements addressed by a given 
technology from the installation requirements of a 
technology component and proposes a representation to 
specify the implementation-specific, installation-related specification of software 
technology. The paper also discuses a framework 
for building a technology component archive using 
the proposed representations and a set of 
metrics is introduced to assist designers in 
identifying the ìbest-fitî candidate from the component 
archive --- ìbest fitî in terms of 
satisfying domain, installation and integration requirements.