Enabling Reuse-Based Software Development of Large-Scale Systems

  • Authors:

  • Richard W. Selby

  • Affiliations:

  • IEEE

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.02

Visualization

Abstract

Software reuse enables developers to leverage past accomplishments and facilitates significant improvements in software productivity and quality. Software reuse catalyzes improvements in productivity by avoiding redevelopment and improvements in quality by incorporating components whose reliability has already been established. This study addresses a pivotal research issue that underlies software reuse驴what factors characterize successful software reuse in large-scale systems? The research approach is to investigate, analyze, and evaluate software reuse empirically by mining software repositories from a NASA software development environment that actively reuses software. This software environment successfully follows principles of reuse-based software development in order to achieve an average reuse of 32 percent per project, which is the average amount of software either reused or modified from previous systems. We examine the repositories for 25 software systems ranging from 3,000 to 112,000 source lines from this software environment. We analyze four classes of software modules: modules reused without revision, modules reused with slight revision (