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The paper describes an approach to software reuse which is under development and evaluation at Andersen Consulting. Instead of restricting reuse to just code, we are exploring reuse of architectures that include component interfaces, interconnections between components, and platform configuration. The approach assumes that first a desired architecture is chosen and tailored according to the constraints at hand. Then, appropriate components are retrieved from a repository, subjected to restricted modifications if necessary and "glued" together following the architectural guidelines. Finally, a version of a system is automatically packaged from the selected components and the architectural specifications. The paper presents the approach and some initial experiments in the design of an interface specification language and an environment in which modules can be interconnected and their interface specifications used to determining the integrity of the connections.>

SPECIFIER, an interactive system which derives formal specifications of data types and programs from their informal descriptions, is described. The process of deriving formal specifications is viewed as a problem-solving process. The system uses common problem-solving techniques such as schemas, analogy, and difference-based reasoning to derive formal specifications. If an informal description is a commonly occurring operation for which the system has a schema, then the formal specification is derived by instantiating the schema. If there is a no such schema, SPECIFIER tries to find a previously solved problem which is analogous to the current problem. If the problem found is directly analogous to the current problem, it applies an analogy mapping to obtain a formal specification. On the other hand, if the analogy found is only approximate, it solves the directly analogous part of the problem by analogy and performs difference-based reasoning using the remaining (unmatched) parts to transform the formal specification obtained by analogy to a formal specification for the entire original problem.>