An empirical study of a software reuse reference model

In software engineering there is a need for technologies that will significantly decrease effort in developing software products, increase quality of software products and decrease time-to-markets. The software development industry can be improved by utilizing and managing software reuse with an “empirically validated reference model” that can be customized for different kinds of software development enterprises. Our research thesis is that software development based on a software reuse reference model improves the competitive edge and time-to-market of many software development enterprises. The definition and study of such a model has been carried out using four steps. First, the reference model developed here is based on the existing software reuse concepts. Second, this reference model is an empirical study which uses both legacy studies and lessons learned studies. Third, the impact of the reference model on software development effort, quality, and time-to-market is empirically derived. Fourth, an initial set of successful cases, which are based on the software reuse reference model utilization, are identified. The main contribution of this paper is a reference model for the practice of software reuse. A secondary contribution is an initial set of cases from software development enterprises which are successful in the practice of reuse in terms of decreased effort, increased quality and a high correlation in their application of our software reuse reference model activities.     

Assessing software product line potential: an exploratory industrial case study

Corporate organizations sometimes offer similar software products in certain domains due to former company mergers or due to the complexity of the organization. The functional overlap of such products is an opportunity for future systematic reuse to reduce software development and maintenance costs. Therefore, we have tailored existing domain analysis methods to our organization to identify commonalities and variabilities among such products and to assess the potential for software product line (SPL) approaches. As an exploratory case study, we report on our experiences and lessons learned from conducting the domain analysis in four application cases with large-scale software products. We learned that the outcome of a domain analysis was often a smaller integration scenario instead of an SPL and that business case calculations were less relevant for the stakeholders and managers from the business units during this phase. We also learned that architecture reconstruction using a simple block diagram notation aids domain analysis and that large parts of our approach were reusable across application cases.     

LMI-based robust model predictive control and its application to an industrial CSTR problem

In this paper, robust model predictive control (MPC) is studied for a class of uncertain linear systems with structured time-varying uncertainties. This general class of uncertain systems is useful for nonlinear plant modeling in many circumstances. The controller design is characterizing as an optimization problem of the “worst-case” objective function over infinite moving horizon, subject to input and output constraints. A sufficient state-feedback synthesis condition is provided in the form of linear matrix inequality (LMI) optimizations, and will be solved on-line. The stability of such a control scheme is determined by the feasibility of the optimization problem. To demonstrate its usefulness, this robust MPC technique is applied to an industrial continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) problem with explicit input and output constraints. Its relative merits to conventional MPC approaches are also discussed.     

A software reuse measure: Monitoring an enterprise-level model driven development process

The purpose of the research discussed here is to establish a metric for the measurement of reuse in a generic enterprise-level model context and to use this approach to create a specific metric for a company. The paper demonstrates how a software development firm can monitor the reuse success in the development process using the measure. Traditionally, the reuse rate is defined as the percentage of the development effort retrieved as code segments from a software repository. The metric proposed here extends this definition to include reuse of generic enterprise-level model components. An example is given of the successful assessment of a reuse percentage for a software developer's actual project.     

Assessing the cost-effectiveness of software reuse: A model for planned reuse

Information systems development is typically acknowledged as an expensive and lengthy process, often producing code that is of uneven quality and difficult to maintain. Software reuse has been advocated as a means of revolutionizing this process. The claimed benefits from software reuse are reduction in development cost and time, improvement in software quality, increase in programmer productivity, and improvement in maintainability. Software reuse entails undeniable costs of creating, populating, and maintaining a library of reusable components. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some organizations benefit from reuse. However, many software developers practicing reuse claim these benefits without formal demonstration thereof. There is little research to suggest when the benefits are expected and to what extent they will be realized. For example, does a larger library of reusable components lead to increased savings? What is the impact of component size on the effectiveness of reuse? This research seeks to address some of these questions. It represents the first step in a series wherein the effects of software reuse on overall development effort and costs are modeled with a view to understanding when it is most effective.     

Quality,productivity and economic benefits of software reuse: a review of industrial studies

Systematic software reuse is proposed to increase productivity and software quality and lead to economic benefits. Reports of successful software reuse programs in industry have been published. However, there has been little effort to organize the evidence systematically and appraise it. This review aims to assess the effects of software reuse in industrial contexts. Journals and major conferences between 1994 and 2005 were searched to find observational studies and experiments conducted in industry, returning eleven papers of observational type. Systematic software reuse is significantly related to lower problem (defect, fault or error) density in five studies and to decreased effort spent on correcting problems in three studies. The review found evidence for significant gains in apparent productivity in three studies. Other significant benefits of software reuse were reported in single studies or the results were inconsistent. Evidence from industry is sparse and combining results was done by vote-counting. Researchers should pay more attention to using comparable metrics, performing longitudinal studies, and explaining the results and impact on industry. For industry, evaluating reuse of COTS or OSS components, integrating reuse activities in software processes, better data collection and evaluating return on investment are major challenges.

Modeling and evaluating design alternatives for an on-lineinstrumentation system: a case study

This paper demonstrates the use of a model-based evaluation approach for instrumentation systems (ISs). The overall objective of this study is to provide early feedback to tool developers regarding IS overhead and performance; such feedback helps developers make appropriate design decisions about alternative system configurations and task scheduling policies. We consider three types of system architectures: network of workstations (NOW), symmetric multiprocessors (SMP), and massively parallel processing (MPP) systems. We develop a Resource OCCupancy (ROCC) model for an on-line IS for an existing tool and parameterize it for an IBM SP-2 platform. This model is simulated to answer several “what if” questions regarding two policies to schedule instrumentation data forwarding: collect-and-forward (CF) and batch-and-forward (BF). In addition, this study investigates two alternatives for forwarding the instrumentation data: direct and binary tree forwarding for an MPP system. Simulation results indicate that the BF policy can significantly reduce the overhead and that the tree forwarding configuration exhibits desirable scalability characteristics for MPP systems. Initial measurement-based testing results indicate more than 60 percent reduction in the direct IS overhead when the BF policy was added to Paradyn parallel performance measurement tool     

Understanding reuse of software examples: A case study of prejudice in a community of practice

ContextThe context of this research is software developers’ perceptions about the use of code examples in professional software development.ObjectiveThe primary objective of this paper is to identify the human factors that dominate example usage among professional software developers, and to provide a theory that explains these factors.MethodTo achieve this goal, we analyzed the perceptions of professional software developers as manifested on LinkedIn online community. We analyzed the data qualitatively using adapted grounded theory research procedures.ResultsThe research yields an initial framework of key factors that dominate professional developers’ perception regarding example usage. We use the theoretical lens of prejudice theory to put these factors in a broader context, and outline initial recommendations to address these factors in professional organizational context.ConclusionThe results of this work, in particular the use of qualitative techniques – allowed us to obtain rich insight into key human factors that affect professional software developers, and enrich the body of literature on the issues of reuse. These factors need to be taken into account as part of an organizational reuse strategy.     

Quality improvement using a software reuse failure modes model

The paper presents a failure modes model of parts-based software reuse, and shows how this model can be used to evaluate and improve software reuse processes. The model and the technique are illustrated using survey data about software reuse gathered from 113 people from 29 organizations     

Three empirical evaluations of a software reuse reference model

The contribution of this paper is three empirical evaluations of a reference model for the practice of software reuse. Our research thesis is that software development based upon a software reuse reference model improves quality of products, productivity of processes and product time‐to‐market for many software development enterprises. The definition and investigation of such a model has been carried out using three steps. First, the reference model is developed based on existing software reuse concepts. Second, this reference model is empirically evaluated using three studies: one using a survey method, one using a case studies method, and one using a legacy studies method. Third, the impact of the reference model on software development productivity, quality, and time‐to‐market is empirically derived. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Three empirical studies of a software reuse reference model

The contribution of this paper is a reference model for the practice of software reuse. Our research thesis is that software development based upon a software reuse reference model improves quality of products, productivity of processes and product time‐to‐market for many software development enterprises. The definition and investigation of such a model has been carried out using three steps. First, the reference model is developed based on existing software reuse concepts. Second, this reference model is empirically studied using both legacy studies and lessons learned studies. Third, the impact of the reference model on software development productivity, quality, and time‐to‐market is empirically derived. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Usage and usefulness of technical software documentation: An industrial case study

ContextSoftware documentation is an integral part of any software development process. However, software practitioners are often concerned about the value, degree of usage and usefulness of documentation during development and maintenance.ObjectiveMotivated by the needs of NovAtel Inc. (NovAtel), a world-leading company developing software systems in support of global navigation satellite systems, and based on the results of a former systematic mapping study, we aimed at better understanding of the usage and the usefulness of various technical documents during software development and maintenance.MethodWe utilized the results of a former systematic mapping study and performed an industrial case study at NovAtel. From the joint definition of the analysis goals, the research method incorporates qualitative and quantitative analysis of 55 documents (design, test and process related) and 1630 of their revisions. In addition, we conducted a survey on the usage and usefulness of documents. A total of 25 staff members from the industrial partner, all having a medium to high level of experience, participated in the survey.ResultsIn the context of the case study, a number of findings were derived. They include that (1) technical documentation was consulted least frequently for maintenance purpose and most frequently as an information source for development, (2) source code was considered most frequently as the preferred information source during software maintenance, (3) there is no significant difference between the usage of various documentation types during both development and maintenance, and (4) initial hypotheses stating that up-to-date information, accuracy and preciseness have the highest impact on usefulness of technical documentation.ConclusionsIt is concluded that the usage of documentation differs for various purposes and it depends on the type of the information needs as well as the tasks to be completed (e.g., development and maintenance). The results have been confirmed to be helpful for the company under study, and the firm is currently implementing some of the recommendations given.     

Mining extremely small data sets with application to software reuse

A serious problem encountered by machine learning and data mining techniques in software engineering is the lack of sufficient data. For example, there are only 24 examples in the current largest data set on software reuse. In this paper, a recently proposed machine learning algorithm is modified for mining extremely small data sets. This algorithm works in a twice‐learning style. In detail, a random forest is trained from the original data set at first. Then, virtual examples are generated from the random forest and used to train a single decision tree. In contrast to the numerous discrepancies between the empirical data and expert opinions reported by previous research, our mining practice shows that the empirical data are actually consistent with expert opinions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Software testing with code-based test generators: data and lessons learned from a case study with an industrial software component

Automatically generating effective test suites promises a significant impact on testing practice by promoting extensively tested software within reasonable effort and cost bounds. Code-based test generators rely on the source code of the software under test to identify test objectives and to steer the test case generation process accordingly. Currently, the most mature proposals on this topic come from the research on random testing, dynamic symbolic execution, and search-based testing. This paper studies the effectiveness of a set of state-of-the-research test generators on a family of industrial programs with nontrivial domain-specific peculiarities. These programs are part of a software component of a real-time and safety-critical control system and integrate in a control task specified in LabVIEW, a graphical language for designing embedded systems. The result of this study enhances the available body of knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of test generators. The empirical data indicate that the test generators can truly expose subtle (previously unknown) bugs in the subject software and that there can be merit in using different types of test generation approaches in a complementary, even synergic fashion. Furthermore, our experiment pinpoints the support for floating point arithmetics and nonlinear computations as a major milestone in the path to exploiting the full potential of the prototypes based on symbolic execution in industry.     

基于行为的软件测试过程模型及其应用研究

在深入研究各种综合测试技术的基础上,通过对比分析各种主流的测试模型,提出了一种基于行为的软件测试过程模型,包括了测试设计、测试计划、测试执行、测试结果分析和测试重用等活动,把这些测试活动嵌入到软件开发的整个生命周期当中。然后将这种测试模型应用到一个大型的应用程序测试项目(AMP)中,发现这种测试模型在尽早发现Bug和回归测试选择效率上具有较好的测试效果。     

Trends in software reuse research: A tertiary study

ContextThe reuse of software has been a research topic for more than 50 years. Throughout that time, many approaches, tools and proposed techniques have reached maturity. However, it is not yet a widespread practice and some issues need to be further investigated. The latest study on software reuse trends dates back to 2005 and we think that it should be updated.ObjectiveTo identify the current trends in software reuse research.MethodA tertiary study based on systematic secondary studies published up to July 2018.ResultsWe identified 4,423 works related to software reuse, from which 3,102 were filtered by selection criteria and quality assessment to produce a final set of 56 relevant studies. We identified 30 current research topics and 127 proposals for future work, grouped into three broad categories: Software Product Lines, Other reuse approaches and General reuse topics.ConclusionsFrequently reported topics include: Requirements and Testing in the category of Lifecycle phases for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making in the category of General Reuse. The most mentioned future work proposals were Requirements, and Evolution and Variability management for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making. The identified trends, based on future work proposals, demonstrate that software reuse is still an interesting area for research. Researchers can use these trends as a guide to lead their future projects.     

Strategies for software reuse: a principal component analysis of reuse practices

This research investigates the premise that the likelihood of success of software reuse efforts may vary with the reuse strategy employed and, hence, potential reuse adopters must be able to understand reuse strategy alternatives and their implications. We use survey data collected from 71 software development groups to empirically develop a set of six dimensions that describe the practices employed in reuse programs. The study investigates the patterns in which these practices co-occur in the real world, demonstrating that the dimensions cluster into five distinct reuse strategies, each with a different potential for reuse success. The findings provide a means to classify reuse settings and assess their potential for success.     

Measuring software quality: a case study

The National Security Agency's (NSA) mission is to provide support for the security of the United States. Over the years, the Agency has become extremely dependent on the software that makes up its information technology infrastructure. NSA has come to view software as a critical resource upon which much of the world's security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness increasingly rests. To ensure cost effective delivery of high quality software, NSA has analyzed effective quality measures applied to a sample code base of 25 million lines. This case study dramatically illustrates the benefits of code level measurement activities     

Value-based software engineering: a case study

The information technology field's accelerating rate of change makes feedback control essential for organizations to sense, evaluate, and adapt to changing value propositions in their competitive marketplace. Although traditional project feedback control mechanisms can manage the development efficiency of stable projects in well-established value situations, they do little to address the project's actual value, and can lead to wasteful misuse of an organization's scarce resources. The value-based approach to software development integrates value considerations into current and emerging software engineering principles and practices, while developing an overall framework in which these techniques compatibly reinforce each other.