Wiederverwendung in der Informationsverarbeitung - Re-use, Re-engineering, Reverse Engineering

Software reuse becomes more and more important in all fields of information management. It is influencing the creation of new tools and development environments as well as the modelling and development of applications and infrastructures. The report introduces this extensive field of software technology, points to important problems and explains typical terms. In this report, software reuse includes all activities realizing a repeated use of software objects. Particularly these are techniques which are named "Re-use" and "Re- engineering". A special issue is the field "Reverse- Engineering" because its methods on the one hand represent a part of Re-engineering and on the other hand they are independently used to rebuild documentation, design, and specification from an implementation. The main topics of this report are the fields of Re-engineering and Reverse engineering. There are introduced goals, methods and tools, whereby emphasis is given to redocumentation, recycling, renovation, and portability of "old" software. Problems of complexity and quality of software are discussed as well. In addition to these main topics further problems are analysed such as ways and strategies of Reuse, management and use of reusable software components, migration of programs and data and further more social, economical, juridical problems. The problem "Reuse and Software crisis" is critically commented and possibilities of solutions for the software crisis are proposed.