A Flexible Approach to Constructing Virtual Reuse Libraries

The development and population of a reuse library is likely to be the largest investment that an organisation will make in adopting reuse. The content of the library is potentially vast, particularly in situations where knowledge reuse must be supported across the lifecycle. In this paper we present our experience with a two tier reuse library. The first tier forms a conventional library of reusable components. The second tier, the concern of this paper, contains the larger amount of potentially reusable, but at present project specific, components. Reuse libraries are often constructed by copying and restructuring the contents of project filestores. Instead, we create a virtual library, using World-WideWeb techniques, that provides intuitive structuring and browsing facilities over the existing filestore. This approach has many advantages, including: