About the Book
This book is an updated edition of the previous McGraw-Hill edition, which was an essential guide to successful reuse across the entire software life cycle. It explains in depth the fundamentals, economics, and metrics of software reuse. The bottom line is good news for designers of complex systems: Systematic software reuse can succeed, even if the underlying technology is changing rapidly. Software reuse has been called the central technical concept of object-oriented design. This book covers reuse in object-oriented systems, but goes far beyond in its coverage of complex systems - the type that may evolve into "systems of systems." Important new material has been added to this edition on the changed state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice of software reuse, on product-line architectures, on the economics of reuse, on the maintenance of COTS-based systems. A case study using DoDAF (The Department of Defense Architectural Framework) in system design has been included to show some new thinking about reuse and some attributes of large-scale components of very large systems. After an introduction to basics, the book shows you how to: 1. Access reuse and disadvantages for your systems. 2.Understand and use domain analysis. 3.Estimate total costs, including maintenance, using life-cycle-based models. 4.Organize and manage reuse libraries. 5.Certify software components that have been created at any phase of the software life cycle your organization uses. 6.Implement systematic reuse using COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf) components and other existing software. The book includes several models and reengineering checklists, as well as important case studies. These models and checklists help anyone faced with the problem of whether to build, buy, reuse, or reengineer any software component, system, or subsystem of reasonable complexity. Such components, subsystems, and systems often fit into the new paradigms of service-oriented architectures (SOA) and software-as-a-service (SaAS). Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs emphasizes the cost efficient development of high-quality software systems in changing technology environments. Our primary example of domain analysis, which is the analysis of software into potentially reusable artifacts, often at a higher level than simply source code modules, is the assessment of possibilities for reuse in the Linux kernel. There are eight chapters in Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs: What is Software Reuse?, Techniques (which included domain analysis), Reuse Libraries, Certification of Reusable Software Components, The Economics of Software Reuse, Reengineering, Case Studies, and Tools For Software Reuse.
About the Author :
Ronald J. Leach recently retired as Professor and Chair Emeritus from the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, where he had taught since 1969. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include distributed systems, performance modeling and capacity planning; and most areas of software engineering, especially software reuse, fault-tolerance, and software performance measurement and their empirical foundations. Much of this book is based on his 27 years of UNIX experience as a researcher in fault-tolerance; a teacher of operating systems, emphasizing UNIX; and as a consultant, who has analyzed hundreds of thousands of lines of UNIX code. Some of his current work includes the application of computing to the social sciences, especially in the area of name matching within historical documents, using both his computer search skills and genealogical knowledge. He is a frequent member of ABET site visit teams. He is an experienced cruise ship lecturer, with special emphasis on identity theft and computer forensics. He also lectures to other groups. Ron Leach is the author of seven print books: "Using C in Software Design," Academic Press Professional,"Advanced Topics in UNIX," John Wiley; "Object-Oriented Design and Programming in C++," Academic Press Professional, Software Reuse: Methods, Models, and Costs," McGraw-Hill, "Introduction to Software Engineering," CRC Press, "Genealogy for the Information Age," Disruptive Publishing, and "Relative Genealogy," Disruptive Publishing. He has published two books on the subject of identity theft: "Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft," as an ebook, and "Identity Theft in the Cyber Age," which is available as both an ebook and in print. Revised editions of many of these are available as ebooks. Dr. Leach has offered technical training and seminars on software reuse, reengineering, and testing on three continents. He has lectured on a variety of other topics between continents! He is also the author or co-author of more than one hundred technical papers. In his spare time, he is the co-Editor of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal and is webmaster for its newly designed website.
