What software reuse benefits have been transferred to the industry? A systematic mapping study

Abstract

Context: The term software reuse was first used in 1968 at the NATO conference. Since then, work in the scientific literature have stated that the application of software reuse offers benefits such as increase in quality and productivity. Nonetheless, in spite of many publications reporting software reuse experiences, evidence that such benefits having reached industrial settings is scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the benefits transferred to real-world settings by the application of software reuse strategies. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS). Our search strategies retrieved a set of 2,413 papers out of which 49 were selected as primary studies. We defined five facets to classify these studies: a) the type of benefit, b) the reuse process, c) the industry's domain, d) the type of reuse and e) the type of research reported. Results: Quality increase (28 papers) and Productivity increase (25 papers) were the two most mentioned benefits. Component-Based Development (CBD) was the most reported reuse strategy (41%), followed by Software Product Lines (SPL, 30%). The selected papers mentioned fourteen industrial domains, of which four stand out: aerospace and defense, telecommunications, electronics and IT services. The application of systematic reuse was reported in 78% of the papers. Regarding the research type, 50% use evaluation research as the investigation method. Finally, 13 papers (27%) reported validity threats for the research method applied. Conclusions: The literature analyzed presents a lack of empirical data, making it difficult to evaluate the effective transfer of benefits to the industry. This work did not find any relationship between the reported benefits and the reuse strategy applied by the industry or the industry domain. Although the most reported research method was industrial case studies (25 works), half of these works (12) did not report threats to validity.

15 Years of Reuse Experience in Evolutionary Prototyping for the Defense Industry

“…Similar benefits of software reuse in industrial contexts are reported in the literature [14,2]. The most reported benefits are increased quality [2], increased productivity [14,2], reduced development cost and time and a lower defect rate [2]. While reflecting on 15 years of reuse, we observe these same benefits throughout our different prototypes.…”

Reuse in component-based prototyping: an industrial experience report from 15 years of reuse

“…Similar benefits of software reuse in industrial contexts are reported in the literature [16,2]. The most reported benefits are increased quality [2], increased productivity [16,2], reduced development cost and time and a lower defect rate [2]. While reflecting on 15 years of reuse, we observe these same benefits throughout our different prototypes.…”

CODE reuse in practice: Benefiting or harming technical debt

“…By acknowledging the tremendous relevance of technical debt in software development industries, the TD community is striving to produce methods and tools for TD Management (TDM) that would reduce the amount of TD in the software, by either preventing the accumulation of additional TD, or by removing the existing one ( Arvanitou et al, 2019 ). To this end, the roots of TD have been extensively studied Mo et al, According to Barros-Justo et al (2018) , research efforts should focus on the use of quality models for testing the actual impact of reuse benefits, with maintainability appointed as the most important one, while linking them to specific practices. In this direction Mikkonen and Taivalsari (2019) stress that the revival of software reuse, due to the enormous amount of freely available source code on the web, poses new challenges to the software engineering community related to the systematic analysis of the compatibility and the properties of popular open source components.…”