The Empirical Studies on Quality Benefits of Reusing Software Components

Abstract

The benefits of reusing software components have been studied for many years. Several previous studies have concluded that reused components have fewer defects in general than non-reusable components. However, few of these studies have gone a further step, i.e., investigating which type of defects has been reduced because of reuse. Thus, it is suspected that making a software component reusable will automatically improve its quality. This paper presents an on-going industrial empirical study on the quality benefits of reuse. We are going to compare the defects types, which are classified by ODC (Orthogonal Defect Classification), of the reusable component vs. the non-reusable components in several large and medium software systems. The intention is to figure out which defects have been reduced because of reuse and the reasons of the reduction.

Towards Automated Monitoring and Forecasting of Probabilistic Quality Properties in Open Source Software (OSS): A Striking Hybrid Approach

“…Most of the work on the QA aspect of OSS in the literature has typically relied on quality benefit gained during reusing of components based on the intuition that the reusable components have less defect density than non-reusable [3] and to some extent bring about a more quality product. Besides this intuition, although during the software reuse either development for or with reuse the new components are further tested through test integration and prototyping as a prelude to the deployment but neither of which would not be sufficient to provide a high quality and validated system (can be viewed as partial assurance of the quality of such systems).…”

Reusing Code from StackOverflow: The Effect on Technical Debt

“…Early empirical studies have provided evidence that systematic reuse can have a positive effect on software quality, especially leading to lower fault-density [9]- [11]. An overview of empirical studies on quality benefits from reusing software components is available in the study by Li et al [12]. However, we have been able to identify only one study that focuses on the effect of reuse from StackOverflow, in which 22 Android projects have been investigated revealing that there is preliminary evidence of a negative effect on quality, in terms of bug fixing activity [13].…”

“…Also, we have set a maximum limit, which was necessary, due to time and resource constraints. To come up with a number for the upper limit, we adopted the "rule of 30", which states that if a code element consists of more than 30 sub-elements then the comprehension and maintenance of the element becomes intractable [12]. This rule applies to the lines of code in a method, in the methods that exist in a class and so on.…”

Specification of personalization in web application design

“…as a separate aspect of the website), independent of the underlying technology allowing the definition of abstract personalization specifications which is a prerequisite for portability and reuse. Reuse in software engineering/programming is generally accepted and promoted to improve productiveness [11,12]. The proposed solution is based on a high level rule language called PRML (Personalization Rules Modeling Language) [13,14] that can be used by the designer to specify at design time the personalization to be performed at runtime.…”