Experience report: using RESOLVE/C++ for commercial software

  • Authors:

  • Joseph E. Hollingsworth;Lori Blankenship;Bruce W. Weide

  • Affiliations:

  • Holly Software, Inc., PO Box 480, Floyds Knobs, IN;Holly Software, Inc., PO Box 480, Floyds Knobs, IN;Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

  • Venue:
  • SIGSOFT '00/FSE-8 Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering: twenty-first century applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Academic research sometimes suffers from the “ivory tower” problem: ideas that sound good in theory do not necessarily work well in practice. An example of research that potentially could impact practice over the next few years is a novel set of component-based software engineering design principles, known as the RESOLVE discipline. This discipline has been taught to students for several years [23], and previous papers (e.g., [24]) have reported on student-sized software projects constructed using it. Here, we report on a substantial commercial product family that was engineered using the same principles — an application that we designed, built, and continue to maintain for profit, not as part of a research project. We discuss the impact of adhering to a very prescriptive set of design principles and explain our experience with the resulting applications. Lessons learned should benefit others who might be considering adopting such a component-based software engineering discipline in the future.