An exploratory study on reuse at google

Abstract

Software reuse is a challenging and multifaceted topic. Significant research effort has been spent to address technical and organizational aspects. However, adoption of proposed practices and novel approaches often proceeds slowly. Additionally, little is known on how reuse is currently effected in practice and which solutions have proven useful. This paper aims to shed light on the matter by studying the current practice of reuse at Google. We conduct an exploratory study with a total of 49 participants of which 39 answered our online questionnaire and 10 participated in our 1h interviews. We assess reuse practices, success factors and challenges and collect ideas for improvement.We distill our findings to provide practitioners with examples of scalable reuse practices and detail on prerequisites required to implement/tailor a similar reuse approach. Furthermore, we point out open issues to support researchers and practitioners alike to align their efforts for developing solutions.

Combining Clone Detection and Latent Semantic Indexing to Detect Re-implementations

“…Nevertheless, developers tend to duplicate existing functionality [26], [3], missing out on the benefits of reuse opportunities. This results in the creation of redundancies ranging from exact copies (Type-1 clones) to independent re-implementations of existing functionality that do not share a common origin in terms of code (Type-4 clones, also known as "Simions" [25]).…”

“…However, they can happen easily for various reasons, such as difficulties of finding or accessing reusable entities, a reuse averse development culture, or organizational limitations [3]. Prior work has addressed cases of semantic code duplication and termed them as Type-4 clones [30], "wide miss" clones [29], and Simions [25].…”

A Novel Approach to Detect Unintentional Re-implementations

“…Nevertheless, developers tend to re-implement existing functionality [18], [3], missing out on the benefits of reuse opportunities. Furthermore, this can result in the creation of "Simions" [17], independent reimplementations of existing functionality that do not share a common origin in terms of code.…”

“…This entails a certain amount of parallel implementation efforts. Despite the higher probability of a required functionality being available, the increasing effort for searching, understanding and adapting a reusable incites implementing functionality from scratch [3], [18]. (2) The use of established protocols might impose specific implementation steps that are duplicated [1].…”

“…Practitioners, on the other hand, miss an approach providing support to avoid new and discover existing re-implementations [3]. Therefore, we need a new approach to discover missed reuse opportunities in the form of (unintentional) re-implementations.…”