The Solution Space Organization: Linking Information Systems Architecture and Reuse

Nowadays, improvement of software development productivity is among the main strategies proposed by academics and practitioners to deal with the chronic software crisis. As stressed by many authors during the last two decades, reuse of software artifacts provides efficient instruments to implement this strategy. Nevertheless, despite organizations high investments in defining software reuse plans, implementation of such plans has often failed. We think that the identification and description of the relationships between the areas of information systems architecture and software reuse are required to define a successful reuse approach which takes into account all the dimensions of information systems. In this chapter, we propose a structural and architecture-oriented description of the solution space associated with information systems development. We use such a description to build a reuse approach compliant with all the dimensions of information systems including the organizational, economic, and human dimensions.