Information System Design Based on Reuse of Conceptual Components

Abstract

Current trends in modern Information System development are more and more based on the exploitation of the experience gained in previous developments of similar systems. While in the early years of Information System development each system was analyzed and designed from scratch, it alreadybecame clear in the 1980s that developing a system which meets user expectations implies being widely aware of the characteristics of the specific application domain and being able to build upon previous experience. Such “reuse of experience’’ was initially performed informally. Meanwhile, in recent years, systematic approaches based on reuse of code and design experience have appeared in the literature of software engineering and in various commercial development environments (Biggerstaff, 1989; Krueger, 1992). For example, application frameworks (Johnson, 1997), seen as code and related specification and design artifacts, are typical structures that have been studied in various projects as large-grained components or application skeletons (see for instance (Fusaschi and Montini, 1997) and (D’Souza and Wills, 1998).