Measuring Software Reuse

This book documents methods for quantifying the benefits of software reuse so that developers can accurately judge whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. It explains how to apply reuse metrics, reuse economic models, and reuse Return-On-Investment (ROI) models in diverse organizations and many different programming languages.

The book provides a clear understanding of what software reuse is, where the problems are, what benefits to expect, the activities, and its different forms. The reader is also given an overview of what sofware components are, different kinds of components and compositions, a taxonomy thereof, and examples of successful component reuse. An introduction to software engineering and software process models is also provided.

Managing Software Quality discusses the methods involved in the integration of process, document and code indicators when constructing an evolving picture of quality. Throughout the book the authors describe experiences gained in a four-year on-site validation of the framework, making this book particularly useful for project or program managers, software managers and software engineers. In particular they provide guidance to those in software development and software support who are interested in establishing a measurement programme that includes software quality prediction and assessment. The authors share numerous valuable lessons learned during the research and applications of software quality management.

As a result of the open-source movement there is now a great deal of reusable software available in the public domain. This offers significant functionality that commercial software vendors can use in their software projects. Open-source approaches to software development have illustrated that complex, mission critical software can be developed by distributed teams of developers sharing a common goal. Commercial software vendors have an opportunity to both learn from the op- source community as well as leverage that knowledge for the benefit of its commercial clients. Nonetheless, the open-source movement is a diverse collection of ideas, knowledge, techniques, and solutions. As a result, it is far from clear how these approaches should be applied to commercial software engineering. This paper has looked at many of the dimensions of the open-source movement, and provided an analysis of the different opportunities available to commercial software vendors. References and Notes 1. It can be argued that the open-source community has produced really only two essential 9 products -- Apache (undeniably the most popular web server) and Linux although both are essentially reincarnations of prior systems. Both are also somewhat products of their times: Apache filled a hole in the then emerging Web, at a time no platform vendor really knew how to step in, and Linux filled a hole in the fragmented Unix market, colored by the community s general anger against Microsoft. 2.Evans Marketing Services, Linux Developers Survey, Volume 1, March 2000.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Reuse, ICSR-6, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2000. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on generative reuse and formal description languages, object-oriented methods, product line architectures, requirements reuse and business modeling, components and libraries, and design patterns.

Going where no book on software measurement and metrics has previously gone, this critique thoroughly examines a number of bad measurement practices, hazardous metrics, and huge gaps and omissions in the software literature that neglect important topics in measurement. The book covers the major gaps and omissions that need to be filled if data about software development is to be useful for comparisons or estimating future projects. Among the more serious gaps are leaks in reporting about software development efforts that, if not corrected, can distort data and make benchmarks almost useless and possibly even harmful. One of the most common leaks is that of unpaid overtime. Software is a very labor-intensive occupation, and many practitioners work very long hours. However, few companies actually record unpaid overtime. This means that software effort is underreported by around 15%, which is too large a value to ignore. Other sources of leaks include the work of part-time specialists who come and go as needed. There are dozens of these specialists, and their combined effort can top 45% of total software effort on large projects. The book helps software project managers and developers uncover errors in measurements so they can develop meaningful benchmarks to estimate software development efforts. It examines variations in a number of areas that include: Programming languages Development methodology Software reuse Functional and nonfunctional requirements Industry type Team size and experience Filled with tables and charts, this book is a starting point for making measurements that reflect current software development practices and realities to arrive at meaningful benchmarks to guide successful software projects.

Published in 1993. Software reuse has been shown to achieve improvements in productivity, quality and timeliness of software. The collection of papers in this book were given at a seminar organized by UNICOM and the British Computer Society Software Reuse Specialist Group. They address the reasons why software reuse can maximize an organization's return from past expenditure and ensure a good future expenditure. Increasing the automation of software development requires access to explicit knowledge about processes and products involved. The chapters examine the relationship between reuse and other aspects of software engineering, including management techniques and structures, CASE, methodologies and object orientation. In addition, the papers aim to provide a structures insight into new techniques which will become available through the 1990s. This text is suitable for software managers and directors, software engineers, software professionals, academics, and other involved in software engineering research.

This monograph discusses software reuse and how it can be applied at different stages of the software development process, on different types of data and at different levels of granularity. Several challenging hypotheses are analyzed and confronted using novel data-driven methodologies, in order to solve problems in requirements elicitation and specification extraction, software design and implementation, as well as software quality assurance. The book is accompanied by a number of tools, libraries and working prototypes in order to practically illustrate how the phases of the software engineering life cycle can benefit from unlocking the potential of data. Software engineering researchers, experts, and practitioners can benefit from the various methodologies presented and can better understand how knowledge extracted from software data residing in various repositories can be combined and used to enable effective decision making and save considerable time and effort through software reuse. Mining Software Engineering Data for Software Reuse can also prove handy for graduate-level students in software engineering.