Software artifacts reuse and maintenance: an organizational framework

The role of software systems in organizations is constantly increasing and evolving; it consists of providing business and decision support services. Nevertheless, the value obtained from an organization's vast investment in information technology is often less than expected due in large measure to a crisis in software engineering caused by high maintenance costs and an increasing number of project failures. Many authors stress the fact that software reuse and software architecture permit organizations to improve process productivity, to deal with software complexity and to take into account all the aspects of software, but many problems related to software artifact reuse and maintenance must be solved. The paper provides a reuse organizational framework to deal with these problems, based on the agency theory and software architecture. The authors distinguish four spaces associated with project actors and examine most specifically interrelations between the architecture space and the construction space.