Roadmap: Consuming Assets
This roadmap provides a high-level overview of the tasks supporting asset consumption and how they are used together.
Main Description

The purpose of asset consumption is to locate and apply a Reusable Asset to solve specific problems.

The overall workflow for these tasks is as follows:

Asset consumption is best done when the Asset Consumer has a well-defined problem that needs to be resolved. The Asset Consumer's understanding of the problem directly affects the activities of searching and evaluating an asset for its relevance. The Asset Consumer is affected by the quality of the asset packaging material. This impacts the reuse cost for the Asset Consumer. If it is too difficult to find, evaluate, and reuse an asset, the Asset Consumer will go elsewhere, or will build the solution. See Concept: Reuse Costs.

It is possible that after applying a Reusable Asset, the refined asset may be re-packaged for others to use. For example, applying a domain reference architecture reusable asset and configuring it for a specific application context (Task: Use Asset), may result in an application reference architecture that could be further applied in additional contexts. In such cases, the individual filling the role of the asset consumer would identify the produced application reference architecture as a candidate for further reuse (Task: Conduct Recurring Problem Analysis). This feeds in to the organizational reuse program, which decides which assets to produce.

The following section provides some useful links to guidance supporting the asset consumption tasks:

Searching for Assets
Use an Asset
Additional Supporting Guidance
More Information