Reuse Contracts: Making Systematic Reuse a Standard Practice

While object-orientation has had a large impact on the popularisation of reuse, reuse in OO is mostly ad hoc and thus lessons can be learned from the work on systematic reuse. On the other hand, the emphasis of object-orientation on iterative development can help in reducing the large up-front investments that are typically associated with systematic reuse. We claim that systematic reuse needs to be reconciled with iterative development in order to make reuse a standard practice. Such a reuse methodology must emphasise the co-operation between asset providers and asset reusers to control how assets reused, how assets reused and how changes propagate from assets to applications during iterative development. We propose reuse contracts as the basis for such a methodology.