Identifying and Improving Reusability Based on Coupling Patterns

Abstract

Abstract. Open Source Software (OSS) communitieshave not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code. This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects. This paper empirically analyses four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components. The intended users are members of the OSS development community. Based on the empirical study of the OSS systems and observations made during the study, four practical courses of action are recommended in order to enhance the reusability of current folders that have not been identified as potentially reusable, both from an internal and external standpoint.

Quality Factors and Coding Standards – a Comparison Between Open Source Forges

“…In addition to these quality-related policies in KDE, there is also an automated quality assurance tool called the English Breakfast Network (EBN) 5 . The EBN is a tool for detecting and measuring aspects of quality within KDE as a whole.…”

“…coupling) used to compare the samples. These metrics have been evaluated at the finest granularity level (i.e., source functions or methods); in order to compare them on the system level, they should be elevated to system level [5]. Since the McCabe complexity [22] was evaluated, and the aggregation of this metric at the system level is complicated by its own definition (i.e., the number of independent paths of an executable function, plus one), the rest of this study will analyze the software quality at the function level.…”

D<inf>n</inf>-based architecture assessment of Java Open Source software systems

“…This definition is also followed, e.g. in [3] and implemented in such tools as STAN4J [15] and Dependency Finder [18].…”

Domain Drivers in the Modularization of FLOSS Systems

“…The terminology and definitions used in this paper are therefore extracted from similar studies in the past FLOSS literature [3,9,10,22], especially those related to entities with different levels of granularity. The empirical hypothesis that this paper is built upon is presented in Section 2.1.…”