Surf: Achieving Quality through Software Reuse— a Process Improvement Experiment in Ibm Italia

Managing software quality in a technology-driven, medium or small size development organization, characterized by a very heterogeneous environment, is a complex task that requires particular attention in order to be effective. This paper describes a process improvement experiment (PIE) targeted to the introduction of software reuse practices as an approach to software quality. Main objectives of this PIE have been the reduction of the development cost, of the cycle time, and of the maintenance effort. The most innovative aspect has been the introduction of a “layered” framework for the production of the reusable code. The framework proposes a decomposition of an application into five distinct functional layers and has been designed to maximize reusability when a large number of different hardware and software target platforms must be addressed and the product line is not homogeneous and stable over time. Organizational, technical, and cultural changes have been monitored during the PIE time frame. Surf is the 18 months ESSI PIE n.23752 started on May 1, 1997.