Facts and Fallacies of Reuse in Practice

Abstract

Abstract-Despite the positive effects of reuse claimed in a significant amount of research, anecdotal evidence indicates that industry is not yet experiencing the expected benefit. This dissertation proposal aims to investigate these indicators and therefore addresses reuse from an industrial point of view. As a first step, it empirically assesses the general state of reuse in practice. This is achieved via a large-scale online questionnaire distributed to multiple companies. Complementing the questionnaire, extensive interviews are being scheduled with developers and project managers of the respective companies. The goal is to interview approximately 10 employees per company. Three companies have already committed to the interview phase and contact with seven further companies is currently being established. In a second step, the findings of the study will be used to extract the context and type of reuse, as well as success factors and hindrances. This information forms the basis for an analytical assessment model for internal code reuse, which is developed in a third step. It will capture a range of different aspects of reuse in practice and will be combined with a process to evaluate the adequacy of reuse. The planned result is a larger assessment framework for evaluating the reuse (management) process within a project as well as a multiproject context. As a result, guidelines for code organization should be developed and tested for their effects in improving reuse in one or more of the industrial partners projects.

What software reuse benefits have been transferred to the industry? A systematic mapping study

“…For all facets, only the instances that are mentioned at least twice are included in the map. For example, in the "Reuse Benefits" facet, the benefits that were only mentioned once in the selected literature (such as "Automation" -see table 10) are not included in the tree. Therefore, this criterion for constructing the map best represents the available evidence.…”

“…There is a large research community working on improving software engineering through software reuse, however without good practices for ensuring the transfer into industry, the value of such research is low. Nonetheless, most of the literature about software reuse and their benefits do not report industrial applications [9][10][11][12]; many reported experiences were developed in academic environments, as pilot experiments, toy projects or theoretical proposals without empirical validation.…”

Identifying evolution patterns: a metrics‐based approach for external library reuse

“…Although reused systems can either originate from third party software or in‐house components, we focus on third party software reuse and while our metrics suite can be beneficial for both application programming interface (API) usage or the actual implementation , our metrics mainly focus on the latter reuse type. The inherent benefits of reusing external projects include reduced development effort, increased productivity, and feature‐rich software . These benefits established software reuse as a popular practice during software development .…”

“…The inherent benefits of reusing external projects include reduced development effort, increased productivity, and feature‐rich software . These benefits established software reuse as a popular practice during software development . However, reuse is an evolutionary process because projects tend to reuse new items in the course of their evolution and upgrade the already reused items to their latest versions .…”