Reuse is today mainly gained with empirical tools and methods, and it is necessary to make reuse more systematic in object-oriented information systems design. Reuse at the design phase can be considered from two different yet complementary perspectives: (1) design for reuse or (2) design by reuse. 1. Design for reuse (1) deals with identifying reusable elements, specifying and organizing components, and integrating sets of and models for specifying reusable artifacts. 2. Design by reuse (2) needs to define new information systems engineering processes, and develop tools supporting systematic reuse of components in information systems.

Special attention has been given to contributions aiming to improve the above techniques by adapting novel or “non traditional” approaches at the edge of object-orientation (e.g. aspect-orientation or multi-viewpoints approaches, tools integrating artificial intelligence techniques, information retrieval, . . . ).