A Visual Software Construction Approach

Software reuse is considered one of the eeective approaches for improving software productivity and software quality. Reusable Software Components (RSCs) are the basic building components for software program constructed based on the software reuse approach. An object-oriented approach is used for the design and implementation of our RSCs. So far, we have implemented more than 300 reusable software components (including design level frameworks), in various application domains, with about 200,000 lines of code in our library. These components and frameworks are accumulated from the design and implementation of strategy-based game systems, multimedia authoring systems (2-D and 3-D), multimedia play-back systems, and other application systems. The RSCs and frameworks can be visualized through icons for a visual programming model. In this way, reuse-in-the-large is realized practice by use of a visual programming technique based on these visualized components. In this paper, the design principle and the implementation technique for our RSCs and frameworks are discussed, and a visual software construction paradigm is proposed based on the use of RSCs and frameworks. Speciically, both the design concept and the implementation of such a visual software construction approach and potential advantages of the proposed construction approach are discussed. From our study, we believe that the visual software construction paradigm will become a new direction for both academic researchers and software constructors to search for a better software construction approach. The paper is also submitted for publication in a journal.