Building an Effective CBSE Handbook

The community has made tremendous progress in understanding the critical technology, methods, processes, and organizational factors that lead to effective architected, component reuse. There is of course much more we can do, but still, far too few software developing organizations see reuse or CBSE as the solution to the problems they have, nor do they practice component reuse systematically. Far too few schools teach much about reuse and components. A CBSE handbook, summarizing industry best practice and state-of-the-art, could be an extremely useful vehicle for moving us forward. However, experience with such handbooks in the past suggests that we should think very carefully about who the audience(s) for the handbook are, how this handbook should be used, and how it should consequently be structured. I propose several additions and modifications to the strawman handbook outline, to clarify these issues, as well as incremental adoption, organizational and process maturity, and CBSE methods.