Supporting reuse in systems analysis

Human beings have the ability to capture certain essential features of prior experience in memory and reuse this stored knowledge to make inferences, draw generalizations, or reason using appropriate analogies. A major benefit of reuse is improved productivity. The degree of improvement, however, depends on the similarity of the stored knowledge to the problem at hand. Reuse of prior knowledge has been the subject of much discussion in the systems development arena, and many artifacts have been identified and classified for potential reuse [3]. When attempting to reuse an artifact from a later systems development stage such as program design in an early stage such as systems analysis, it is difficult to determine similarities between stored knowledge to the problem under study, partly because of the unstructured nature of the activities in the early stages. Hence an organization interested in developing a reuse strategy to support early stages is faced with two challenges: