Down toward the bottom of the hierarchies are the practices and processes associated with the engineering of single software systems. Below that are the Essential Tasks that inform and constrain those engineering practices as shown in Figure 1. In this chapter, the Essential Tasks are described and their role in the practice universe is discussed. That role includes serving as a basis for comparing and unifying existing methodologies. How they can be applied in developing common architectures across related products is described.
Common architectures are the necessary prerequisite for component reuse.
A chapter of examples follows each chapter. The remainder of the chapters of the book contain instructions and examples for each of the essential tasks. The tasks follow in order dictated by their information dependencies. As you can see, each chapter is followed by a chapter that illustrates the concepts using an extended example. The extended examples contain useful illustrations of notations, and discussions of evaluation processes.