Software Reuse and Domain Engineering Lab

URL: http://www.nvc.vt.edu/SRRG/srrg.htm
Contact: William Frakes

Software reuse is the use of existing software or software knowledge to construct new software. A key concept in systematic reuse is the domain, a software business area that contains systems sharing commonalities. Most organizations work in only a few domains, repeatedly building similar systems with variations to meet the needs of different customers. Rather than building each variant system from scratch, as is often done today, significant gains are achievable by reusing large portions of previously built systems in the domain to construct new ones. The process of identifying domains, bounding them, and discovering commonalities and variabilities among the systems in the domain is called domain analysis. The entire process of reusing domain knowledge in the production of new systems is called domain engineering or product line engineering.