Can Situations Help with Reusability of Software?

Software reusability is an important concept, as well as a powerful tool, to achieve modular solutions in the design and implementation of modern software systems. There is a wide array of research studies conducted in this area ranging from conceptual level to software construction level. Despite all these good pieces of work, software engineers still need to face the complications that strictly separate design time activities from those carried out at software construction time, to shift their mental gear between high level specification properties and low level implementation details. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified approach to facilitate software reuse. We seek to carry out this enterprise surrounding an abstraction, namely Situation. More specifically, we have created a computing environment and, under its runtime support, a functional programming language called \(Situ^f\) in which domain experts can capture the features of a software system in terms of functional expressions. For each \(Situ^f\) program, declarations and functional expressions provide essential definitions of Situations. Some language constructs of \(Situ^f\), such as the import and include directives, are designed to make it easier to compose new software features by reusing existing ones.