A Process Reference Model for Reuse in Industrial Engineering: Enhancing the ISO/IEC 15504 Framework to Cope with Organizational Reuse Maturity

Improving reuse in industrial engineering for solution providers is more and more recognized as a key to economic success. Improving reuse increases the quality of the engineered systems, shortens engineering time, and decreases engineering costs regarding the development of customer-specific solutions. The GDES-Reuse project is therefore developing an integrated set of methods for assessing an organization’s reuse practices, identifying its reuse potential and guiding the selection, planning and implementation of improvement actions. The paper reports on the project’s work on developing an ISO/IEC 15504 conformant process reference model for reuse in industrial engineering. Based on an overview and the background of the GDES-Reuse improvement methodology, the paper focuses on presenting the structure of the reference model and on describing the necessary enhancements to the ISO/IEC 15504 framework to enable the evaluation of organizational reuse maturity and the integration with a staged model of reuse maturity. A summary of the experiences and insights gained and of the current state of methodology development and future work together with considerations on the applicability of the project’s results to the domain of software engineering round up the paper.