I. Reusable Software Catalogues — Design and Retrieval Support

From an analysis of the reasons why reuse is rarely practised, we conjecture that software must be specifically designed to be reusable. The supplier of reusable software must generalize from the context in which the reusable component evolved to get a component that is useful in other contexts (figure 1). Furthermore, he must document and describe the component so that it may actually be found and reused by other developers, and he must make sure that the functionality implemented by the component is easy to understand and to apply.