Knowledge Maturing as a Process Model for Describing Software Reuse
4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management - Experiences and Visions (WM '07), Potsdam, Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 07), 2, page 155-164. Berlin, GITO, (2007)Abstract
Software reuse has become a major topic in software engineering since reusing artifacts has an important effect on the cost and quality of software products. Accordingly, understanding and managing the mechanisms of software reuse is important for every organization that develops software. In this paper we describe a knowledge maturing process in software engineering and use it to analyze two cases of reusable software artifacts. We argue that the "reusability" of a software artifact is not just an immanent property of the artifact itself, but depends on the "maturity" of the knowledge the artifact embodies. We show that the notion of knowledge maturing can serve as a useful lens for understanding reuse processes and suggest further investigations towards a more holistic concept of reusability.
