Abstract:Current software reuse techniques usually utilize a repository to organize standard and generic reusable assets, such as class libraries and generic component repository in object-oriented programming environments. However, this repository-centered reuse ignores the project related information to some extent, which describes application context of reusable assets. Application context is useful to the understanding and utilization of the assets. In this paper, an alternative object-oriented reuse approach is presented, which utilizes the documentation of a project to organize reusable assets. This so-called project-centered documentation reuse is very useful to the development of a family of software in the same domain. In the paper, some limitations of current object-oriented methods for supporting documentation reuse are discussed and a new method for enhancing documentation for reuse is provided and analyzed. Then, aiming at browsing and maintaining reusable assets in documentation, the needs for navigation in documents are discussed and enumerated.