Synergizing collaboration and reuse in software engineering

Reuse is widely considered key to improving software productivity and quality. It appears in various forms - ranging from independent binary components to highly abstract knowledge codified as design patterns. Common to all these approaches is that they involve different people working together to construct reusable assets and adapt them to work in various contexts. In that sense, reuse is impossible to achieve without collaboration. In this paper, we therefore claim that collaboration should receive a higher profile in reuse. First, we investigate the collaborative aspects in two selected reuse approaches. We then show how they can benefit from collaborative tools, i.e. wikis and collaborative development environments, and propose a novel integration of the latter with recently developed component retrieval systems.