Software Engineering Institute

Because most organizations have a substantial legacy base of existing software assets, few development efforts start from scratch. However, there has not been a systematic way to identify components for reuse or to understand the types of changes that would be required for insertion into a software product line architecture or a new software architecture.  

Options Analysis for Reengineering (OAR) is an approach for making decisions on mining software assets. Mining involves rehabilitating parts of an old system for use in a new system. OAR identifies potential reusable components and analyzes the changes that would be needed to rehabilitate them for reuse within a software product line or new software architecture. OAR also provides an analysis of mining options, as well as the cost, effort, level of difficulty, and risks associated with each option. Recently, OAR has been applied to help a lead system integrator (LSI) make effective decisions on reuse. An LSI is the agent for an organization that is responsible for acquiring a large software-intensive system or system of systems. This note describes the use of OAR to guide decision making on mining assets within an LSI context, referred to as LSI OAR.