No abstract

A fundamental premise for any type of reuse is the knowledge about the existence of the object to be reused. Such knowledge may already be available, for example, due to the past experience of the subject of the reuse action or may be obtained through knowledge dissemination. Information retrieval is a key mechanism for allowing a uniform dissemination of the knowledge about available reusable objects.The instantiation of this problem to the software reuse field is the subject of this work. The synergy among the software reuse and information retrieval fields is exploited in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of an integrated environment that aims at promoting a greater reuse activity level on the quest for developing software with better quality while consuming fewer resources.

A fundamental task when employing software reuse is evaluating its impacts by measuring the relation of reused and developed software, the cost for obtaining reuse and the cost avoided by reusing software during development and maintenance.Different reuse related metrics exist in the literature, varying from strictly code-based metrics, aiming to measure the amount of code reused in a product, to more elaborate cost-based metrics and models, aiming to measure the costs involved in reuse programs and to evaluate the impacts of reuse in software development.Although reuse is commonly claimed to benefit maintenance, the traceability problem is still neglected on the reuse metrics arena, despite its great impacts on software maintenance. Reuse metrics may be used as important support tools for dealing with the traceability between reused assets and their clients.The goal of this work is to evaluate the current state of the art on the reuse metrics area with special emphasis on code-based metrics, building on previous surveys with further analysis and considerations on the applicability of such metrics to reuse traceability.