This book presents 13 high-quality research articles that provide long sought-after answers to
questions concerning various aspects of reuse and integration. Its contents lead to the
inescapable conclusion that software hardware and design productivity - including quality
attributes - is not bounded. It combines the best of theory and practice and contains recipes
for increasing the output of our productivity sectors. The idea of improving software quality
through reuse is not new. After all if software works and is needed why not simply reuse it?
What is new and evolving however is the idea of relative validation through testing and reuse
and the abstraction of code into frameworks for instantiation and reuse. Literal code can be
abstracted. These abstractions can in turn yield similar codes which serve to verify their
patterns. There is a taxonomy of representations from the lowest-level literal codes to their
highest-level natural language descriptions. As a result product quality is improved in
proportion to the degree of reuse at all levels of abstraction. Any software that is in theory
complex enough to allow for self-reference cannot be certified as being absolutely valid. The
best that can be attained is a relative validity which is based on testing. Axiomatic
denotational and other program semantics are more difficult to verify than the codes which
they represent! But are there any limits to testing? And how can we maximize the reliability
of software or hardware products through testing? These are essential questions that need to be
addressed and will be addressed herein.
