Measurement of language-supported reuse in object-oriented and object-based software

A major benefit of object-oriented software development is the support for reuse provided by object-oriented and object-based languages. Yet, measures and measurement tools that quantify such language-supported reuse have been lacking. Comprehensive reuse measures, particularly for reuse with modifications, are necessary to evaluate the status of reuse in an organization and to monitor improvements. We develop a set of measurable reuse attributes appropriate to object-oriented and object-based systems and a suite of measures that quantify these attributes. One of our major objectives is to measure reuse in software written in the object-based language Ada. A set of suitable primitive reuse measures are expressed in Ada Reuse Tables. These tables support the flexible use of primitive measures in programs with nested packages and subprograms, and Ada generic packages. We designed and implemented a prototype Ada Reuse Measurement Analyzer (ARMA) to generate measurement values from Ada programs. ARMA produces a reuse data representation and a corresponding forest representation of an Ada system that contain the information necessary to produce the primitive measures. Developers can use the representations to produce customized reports to satisfy a wide range of measurement goals. We use ARMA to measure primitive reuse attributes for a set of industrial Ada software. We also show that ARMA can be used to generate a set of component access and package visibility measures.