Abstract

The face of software engineering is changing. We’re pressured to deliver systems more and more quickly, and those systems must provide increasingly ambitious functionality. On the other hand, we live in an era in which we can no longer afford—in terms of either time or money—to custom-develop every system. This situation is driving the software development industry toward composing systems from readily available software components, including other whole systems. Opportunistic software systems development (OSSD) is an approach in which developers meld together software pieces that they have found. Most often they find unrelated software components and systems that weren’t designed to work together but that provide functionality they want to include in a new system. Typically, in opportunistic development, developers spend less effort developing software functionality to meet particular requirements and more time developing “glue code” and using other techniques for integrating the various software pieces.