Unanticipated reuse of large-scale software features

  • Authors:
  • Reid Holmes

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Software reuse has been endorsed as a way to reduce development times and costs while increasing software quality and reliability. Techniques designed to encourage software reuse have concentrated on creating reusable software in the form of frameworks, reuse repositories, and component libraries. These approaches do not help a developer who wants to leverage, from an existing system, a complex feature that was not designed to be reusable. We propose an approach that allows developers to investigate the reuse potential of a feature within an existing system, to create a plan for reusing the feature, and to support the transformation of the feature to the developer's project. We believe that by providing explicit support for the reuse of large-scale source code features, the reuse process---and its benefits---can be made accessible to developers.