Assessing Reuse Maturity in Complex Systems Engineering Contexts: Experiences and Results from the Industrial Engineering Domain

Improving reuse in industrial engineering is more and more recognized as a key to economic success by solution providers as it contributes to increasing the quality of the engineered systems, to shortening engineering time, and to decreasing costs for the engineering of generally highly customer-specific solutions. We therefore developed a set of methods for assessing an industrial engineering organization’s reuse practices, identifying its reuse potential and guiding the selection and implementation of improvement actions, all of them based on a common underlying ISO/IEC 15504 conformant process reference model for reuse in industrial engineering as the central means for method integration. The assessment method has been piloted various times during its development in order to gain early feedback from application and feed it back into method development. The final method has been applied to two business units within Siemens AG. The results and experience gained from these two reuse assessments are subject to this industry experience report.