Fostering Reuse by Integration: A Directed System of Systems Development Case

Software reuse is a software engineering technique that fosters productivity and quality by encouraging the reuse of existing software artifacts. Despite advantages, we have identified that software engineers must cope with independent and isolated reuse activities. This isolation can hinder the success of an effective reuse activity. In this paper, we discuss how an integrated support for reuse would benefit this activity. Based on a previous approach for developing directed System of Systems (SoS), and on a systematic mapping about integration of reuse environments, we have identified that SoS and Service Oriented Architecture could be employed together for leveraging reuse, and this has motivated us to design and develop a new directed SoS, named SoS-Reuse. As validation, SoS-Reuse has been qualitatively assessed with software architects. Therefore, we claim that our SoS proposal could be used as a stepping stone to improve the reuse activity and for creating similar SoS for other domains.