Concept: Composing Solutions: Recipes
Describes the recipe concept in an asset-based development context.
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Related Elements
Main Description

As the number of assets within the repository grows, and as the distance between the asset producers and consumers grows, the challenge of finding the right asset, and also understanding how an asset works with other assets, correspondingly grows in difficulty. This problem decreases the value of the asset repository and the assets therein by increasing the reuse costs.

What is needed is a mechanism to loosely couple assets which together provide a coarse-grained solution, and to do this in a manner that keeps the reuse cost down while providing flexibility and customization.

A recipe as a composite solution.

Recipes reference the assets (services, components, and so on) to use, and describe the sequence in which to use them, in order to solve larger-grained problems. A recipe is a special kind of asset that composes other assets. Recipes improve the consumability by reducing the level of effort to:

  • Find the assets that solve a particular problem
  • Figure out how to make several assets work together to solve a particular problem

When assets are organized according to recipes and "ingredients", they can be linked together as illustrated below.

Relationships between recipes and other assets.


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