The ORDB-based SFB-501-Reuse-Repository1

Comprehensive reuse and systematic evolution of reuse artifacts as proposed by the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP) require an integrated management of (potentially reusable) experience data as well as project-related data. This demonstration presents an approach exploiting object-relational database technology to implement a QIP-driven reuse repository. Our SFB-501-Reuse-Repository is designed to support all phases of a reuse process and the accompanying improvement cycle by providing adequate functionality. Its implementation is based on object-relational database technology along with an infrastructure well suited for these purposes. 1 Experience Data Management Learning from experience gained in past projects is seen as a promising way to improve software quality in upcoming projects. As a result, (anti-)patterns, frameworks, and code fragments are being developed to capture the gained experience of software already developed. But experience is not only represented in the form of (directly) reusable software artifacts. To allow comprehensive reuse [2] a large variety of different reusable elements, e. g., process descriptions or lessons learned [3], are to be managed. Consequently, every kind of (software engineering) experience, independent of its type of documentation, is to be regarded as an experience element. However, the benefits that can be achieved by reusing such experience elements strongly depend on their quality. Thus, they always have to represent the latest state of the art. Hence, checking and continuously improving their quality becomes a crucial issue. The Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP) [1] suggested by Basili et. al. deals with this problem by integrating systematic evolution and comprehensive reuse of experience elements into an improvement cycle. A QIP cycle consists of several steps, mainly dealing with the planning and executing of an experiment (project), analysing its results, and packaging the gained experience for later reuse. To comprehensively support the overall QIP cycle we conceptually extended the notion of an Experience Base (EB) as introduced in [1]. Our resulting repository structure consists of two logically disjunct sections called Organization-Wide Section (OWS) and Experiment-Specific Section (ESS), where the OWS is an instantiation of Basili’s EB and the ESS holds the experiment documentations. To evaluate the usefulness of the conceptual extension, we implemented a web-based prototype of the reuse repository [4]. Thus, we also concentrate on the technological advancements for such QIP-driven reuse repositories. Besides discussing the organizational repository structure and the interface functions required to provide comprehensive support, we demonstrate that the infrastructure provided by new Object-Relational Database Management Systems (ORDBMSs) [6] can effectively be used for realization purposes. As far as we know, our approach is the first one evaluating object-relational database technology in the field of reuse repositories. 1. This work has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 501 “Development of Large Systems with Generic Methods”. in: Proc. 8th Int. Conf. on Extending Database Technology (EDBT’2002), Software Demonstration Session, Prague, March 2002, pp. 745-748