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This paper discusses the goals and methods of the Toolpack project and in this context discusses the architecture and design of the software system being produced as the focus of the project. Toolpack is presented as an experimental activity in which a large software tool environment is being created for the purpose of general distribution and then careful study and analysis. The paper begins by explaining the motivation for building integrated tool sets. It then proceeds to explain the basic requirements that an integrated system of tools must satisfy in order to be successful and to remain useful both in practice and as an experimental object. The paper then summarizes the tool capabilities that will be incorporated into the environment. It then goes on to present a careful description of the actual architecture of the Toolpack integrated tool system. Finally the Toolpack project experimental plan is presented, and future plans and directions are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software productivity has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, but not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver [22], [39]; nothing short of an order of magnitude increase in productivity will extricate the software industry from its perennial crisis [39], 1671. Several decades of intensive research in software engineering and artificial intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only) realistic approach to bring about the gains of productivity and quality that the software industry needs. In this paper, we discuss the implications of reuse on the production, with an emphasis on the technical challenges. Software reuse involves building software that is reusable by design and building with reusable software. Software reuse includes reusing both the products of previous software projects and the processes deployed to produce them, leading to a wide spectrum of reuse approaches, from the building blocks (reusing products) approach, on one hand, to the generative or reusable processor (reusing processes), on the other 1681. We discuss the implication of such approaches on the organization, control, and method of software development and discuss proposed models for their economic analysis. Software reuse benefits from methodologies and tools to: 1) build more readily reusable software and 2) locate, evaluate, and tailor reusable software, the last being critical for the building blocks approach. Both sets of issues are discussed in this paper, with a focus on application generators and OO development for the first and a thorough discussion of retrieval techniques for software components, component composition (or bottom-up design), and transformational systems for the second. We conclude by highlighting areas that, in our opinion, are worthy of further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an integrated life-cycle model is presented for use in a software maintenance environment. This model, which represents information about the development and maintenance of software systems, emphasizing relationships between different phases of the software life cycle, provides the basis for automated tools to assist maintenance personnel in making changes to existing software systems. This model is independent of particular specification, design and programming languages because it represents only certain "basic" semantic properties of software systems: control flow, data flow, and data structure. The software development processes by which one phase of the software life cycle is derived from another are represented by graph rewriting rules, which indicate how various components of a software system have been implemented. This approach permits analysis of the basic properties of a software system throughout the soft- ware life cycle. Examples are given to illustrate the integrated software life-cycle model during evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present crisis in software development forces us to reconsider the fundamental ways in which programming is done. One often quoted solution is to exploit more fully the idea of reusable software. It is the purpose of this paper to examine this concept in all of its forms and to assess the current state of the art. In addition to its usual meaning of reusable code, reusability includes reusable design, various forms of specification systems, so-called application generators. and systems for prototyping. We examine each approach from the perspective of the practicing engineer, and we evaluate the work in terms of how it may ultimately improve the development process for large-scale software systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]