Design reuse: chemical engineering vs. software engineering

  • Authors:
  • Paul Kogut

  • Affiliations:
  • Unisys Government Systems, 70 E. Swedesford Rd., Paoli, PA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

The evolution of software engineering to a mature engineering discipline can be accelerated by adopting practices from other mature engineering disciplines. Mature engineering disciplines such as a chemical engineering have extensive systematic design reuse practices. In this paper, design reuse in chemical engineering is compared to current and emerging design reuse in software engineering. This comparison is based on the analogy that a chemical process that is implemented as a chemical plant is comparable to a software architecture that is implemented as a software system. The goal is to gain some insights on how engineering models are used to support systematic design reuse. These insights will help form the basis of model based software engineering.