Integrated Reuse Environments for UML Artifacts

Systematic software reuse is recognized to achieve better software, faster and at a lower cost. The benefits of reuse can be maximized if types of early stage software artifacts, like UML diagrams, can be easily reused. In early-stage reuse, once a match is found, all related later stages artifacts for the match can also be reused.

However, the development of integrated reuse environments to allow managing and reusing repositories of early stage artifacts has not caught adequate attention of researchers yet. In response to this problem, this article proposes an approach to the development of environments integrated with CASE tools and capable facilitating early-stage UML artifacts reuse. Successful implementation of such environments is expected to improve the software quality and developers productivity.