Architectural mismatch: why reuse is so hard - IEEE Software

ware productivity may welldepend on ’ tors, and other related products that the software community’s ability to support reuse and open systems have combine existing pieces of software to been developed. produce new applications. The current Yet the systematic construction of build-from-scratch techniques that large-scale software applications from dominate most software production existing parts remains an elusive goal. must eventually give way to techniques Why? Some of the blame can rightfulthat emphasize construction from ly be placed on the lack of pieces to reusable building blocks. If not, softbuild on or the inability to locate the ware designers may hit a production desired pieces when they do exist. ceiling in generating large, high-qualiBut even when the components are ty software applications. in hand, significant problems often The last decade has seen increased remain because the chosen parts do not support for compositional approaches fit well together. In many cases these to software. There is considerable mismatches may be caused by lowresearch and development in reuse; level problems of interoperability, such industry standards like CORBA have as incompatibilities in programming been created for component interaclanguages, operating platforms, or tion; and many domain-specific archidatabase schemas. These are hard