A Systematic Mapping Study on Software Reuse

Abstract: Context: Software reuse is considered as the key to a successful software development because of its potential to reduce the time to market, increase quality and reduce costs. This increase in demand made the software organizations to envision the use of software reusable assets which can also help in solving recurring problems. Till now, software reuse is confined to reuse of source code in the name of code scavenging. Now a day, software organizations are extending the concepts of software reuse to other life cycle objects as they realized that reuse of source code alone does not save money. The academia has put forward some assets as reusable and presented methods or approaches for reusing them. Also, for a successful software reuse the organizations should assess the value of reuse and keep track on their reuse programs. The other area which is vital for software reuse is the maintenance. Maintenance of reusable software has direct impact on the cost of the software. In this regard, academia has presented a number of techniques, methods, metrics and models for assessing the value of reuse and for maintaining the reusable software. Objectives: In our thesis, we investigate on the reusable assets and the methods/ approaches that are put forward by the academia for reusing those assets. Also a systematic mapping study is performed to investigate what techniques, methods, models and metrics for assessing the value of reuse and for maintaining the reused software are proposed and we also investigate their validation status as well. Methods: The databases like IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Inspec, Springer and Google scholar were used to search for the relevant studies for our systematic mapping study. We followed basic inclusion criteria along with detailed inclusion/exclusion criteria for selecting the appropriate article. Results: Through our systematic mapping study, we could summarize the list of 14 reusable assets along with the approaches/methods for reusing them. Taxonomy for assessing the value of reuse and taxonomy for maintaining the reusable software are presented. We also presented the methods/metrics/models/techniques for measuring reuse to assess its value and for maintaining the reusable software along with their validation status and areas in focus. Conclusion: We conclude that, there is a need for defining a standard set of reusable assets that are commonly accepted by the researchers in the field of software reuse. Most metrics/models/methods/approaches presented for assessing the value of reuse and for maintaining the reuse software are academically validated. Efforts have to be put on industrially validating them using the real data.