A Model-Driven Software Reuse Approach (in portuguese)

Abstract
Software reuse aims at increasing quality and productivity in software development,
avoiding effort duplication and reusing all that is possible from past experiences. Although
it is a simple idea, it is not easy to put reuse in practice, especially in a systematic and
controlled way. Domain engineering and software product lines techniques try to make
this task easier, but there are many other factors that make the reuse adoption difficult.
Among these factors are problems that are inherent to software development in the way it
is conducted today, based on source code. These problems arise from the growing demand
for increasingly complex software, negatively affecting the ability to reuse. Model-driven
development is an attractive alternative in this scenario, leveraging the importance of models
in the software life cycle, incorporating them as part of the final product through modeling and
code generation techniques. As a result, part of the software complexity becomes hidden inside
the generators, shielding the developers, reducing errors, increasing the productivity, quality,
interoperability and maintainability of the produced assets. This dissertation presents the thesis
that model-driven development can effectively increase and/or improve software reuse, and
that to achieve this goal it must be treated in a consistent way inside a domain engineering
process. Particularly, it must acknowledge that it is not possible to fully automate a domain.
It must identify the multiple subdomains with different automation degrees and manage their
integration from the analysis to the implementation. To demonstrate this thesis, a model-driven
software reuse approach is presented, with activities that guide the developer during domain
analysis, design and implementation. The results of an evaluation involving three empirical
studies are also presented. The studies were performed in both academic and industrial
environments, and aimed at determining the viability of the approach and the benefits that can
be achieved with the combination of model-driven development and software reuse techniques.
The results showed that the approach can bring different benefits to software organizations,
such as software reuse quantity and quality improvements, and complexity reduction in product
development and configuration tasks.
Keywords: Software Reuse, Model-Driven Development, Domain Engineering, Software
Product Lines, Domain-Specific Languages, Generative Programming.