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.

Reidar ConradiEmail:

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Parastoo Mohagheghi   is a researcher at SINTEF, Department of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). She received her Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2004 and worked there before joining SINTEF. She has also industry experience from Ericsson in Norway. Her research interests include software quality, model driven development, software reuse, measurement and empirical software engineering. She is a member of IEEE and ACM. Reidar Conradi   received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 1976. From 1972 to 1975 he worked at SINTEF as a researcher. Since 1975 he has been assistant professor at NTNU and a full professor since 1985. He has participated in many national and EU projects, chaired workshops and conferences, and edited several books. His research interests are in software engineering, object-oriented methods and software reuse, distributed systems, software evolution and configuration management, software quality and software process improvement. He is a member of IEEE Computer Society and ACM.