Teaching reuse-driven software engineering through innovative role playing

Reuse-Driven Software Engineering (RDSE) represents a development paradigm that promises to shorten development cycles and cut the costs associated with custom development by assembling systems from pre-existing software compo-nents and services. However, like most approaches that hold the promise of improving software engineering, the success of RDSE is dependent on skilled staff. This means that software engineering education remains the most effective vehicle to the community for reuse-driven technology transfer available. However, the teaching of RDSE poses many challenges to software engineering educators. These difficulties include how to make the benefits of RDSE visible to students and how to establish an acceptable balance between engineering principle and the software practice embodied RDSE. This paper describes a novel approach to teaching RDSE at Lancaster University, UK.