A Contingency Perspective on External Component Reuse and Software Project Success

Software reuse can lower costs and increase the flexibility of the software development process. Despite a large body of research focused on technical factors, there is still limited research on how companies reuse exiting components. In this study, we analyzed the reuse of external software components by taking a contingency approach. Using a survey of IT managers in the software industry, we empirically found that the use of external software components in an organization leads to better outcomes of the software development process. Among large companies, organic organizations adopt external reuse strategies more aggressively than mechanistic organizations. Architecture modularity is a significant driver of software reuse strategies. Finally, our findings suggest that some organizations may view external reuse as a long-term strategy that allows them to organize and deploy resources to achieve efficiency. External software reuse can thus be seen as an effective organization strategy to improve software project success

A Market-Based Approach to Facilitate the Organizational Adoption of Software Component Reuse Strategies

Despite the theoretical benefits of software component reuse (and the abundance of component-based software development on the vendor side), the adoption of component reuse strategies at the organizational level (on the client side) remains low in practice. According to research, the main barrier to advancing component-based reuse strategies into a robust industrial process is coordination failures between software producers and their customers, which result in high acquisition costs for customers. We introduce a component reuse licensing model and combine it with a dynamic price discovery mechanism to better coordinate producers’ capabilities and customer needs. Using an economic experiment with 28 IT professionals, we investigate the extent to which organizations may be able to leverage component reuse for performance improvements. Our findings suggest that implementing component reuse can assist organizations in addressing the issue of coordination failure with software producers while also lowering acquisition costs. We argue that similar designs can be deployed in practice and deliver benefits to software development in organizations and the software industry