Most software reuse research has ignored the role of the software engineer. However, software engineers tend to be better reasoners and have more experiences to recall than tool-based reuse mechanisms. This paper argues for integrating software engineers into existing reuse paradigms and providing tool support to assist problem description and component understanding, selection and adaptation. However, empirical studies indicate that these reuse tasks are difficult, even for experienced software engineers. Therefore, guidelines and a high-level architecture for design of tool support are based on reports of behaviour and problems arising during reuse. 1: Introduction Many technical solutions to software reuse problems have failed to result in widespread reuse. One reason may be that these solutions ignore human involvement. This paper investigates specific problems which arise from excluding software developers from the reuse process and proposes solutions based on human involvement fo...

ions in Requirements Engineering: an Exemplar Approach N.A.M. Maiden & A.G. Sutcliffe Department of Business Computing School of Informatics City University London Abstract This paper reports an intelligent advisor which assists software engineers to reuse domain abstractions to improve the consistency, completeness and clarity of requirement specifications. Understanding unfamiliar domain abstractions can be difficult, so partial exposure and visualisation of concrete examples and metaphors are proposed to aid comprehension prior to reuse. These strategies are incorporated into an iterative fact acquisition and domain retrieval dialogue with important implications for fact capture and modelling during requirements engineering. The effectiveness of this paradigm is shown during user studies with a prototype of the intelligent advisor, during which software engineering retrieved and understood correct domain abstractions whilst analysing a new domain. 1: Introduction Requirements engine...