A Cost Benefit Model for Systematic Software Reuse

Information systems development is typically acknowledged as an expensive and lengthy process, often producing code that is of uneven quality and difficult to maintain. Software reuse has been advocated as a means of revolutionizing this process. The claimed benefits from software reuse are reduction in development cost and time, improvement in software quality, increase in programmer productivity, and improvement in maintainability. Software reuse does incur undeniable costs of creating, populating, and maintaining a library of reusable components. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some organizations benefit from reuse. However, many software developers practicing reuse claim these benefits without formal demonstration thereof. There is little research to suggest when the benefits are expected and to what extent they will be realized. For example, does a larger library of reusable components lead to increased savings? What is the impact of search effectiveness when evaluating reuse? This research seeks to address these questions. It represents the first step in a series wherein the effects of software reuse on overall development effort and costs are modeled with a view to understanding when it is most effective

Efficiency implications of open source commonality and reuse

This paper analyzes the reuse choices made by open source developers and relates them to cost efficiency. We make a distinction between the commonality among applications and the actual reuse of code. The former represents the similarity between the requirements of different applications and, consequently, the functionalities that they provide. The latter represents the actual reuse of code. No application can be maintained for ever. A fundamental reason for the need for periodical replacement of code is the exponential growth of costs with the number of maintenance interventions. Intuitively, this is due to the increasing complexity of software that grows in both size and coupling among different modules. The paper measures commonality, reuse and development costs of 26 open-source projects for a total of 171 application versions. Results show that reuse choices in open-source contexts are not cost efficient. Developers tend to reuse code from the most recent version of applications, even if their requirements are closer to previous versions. Furthermore, the latest version of an application is always the one that has incurred the highest number of maintenance interventions. Accordingly, the development cost per new line of code is found to grow with reuse

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

A Quality Framework for Software Development (QFSD)

INTRODUCTION. This research delivers a new complete and prescriptive software development framework, known as the Quality Framework for Software Development (QFSD) for immediate use by software development practitioners. Whilst there are a number of existing methodologies available, and many software development standards they fail to address the complete development lifecycle. A review of current literature supports this assertion. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES. The overall aim of the research is to create a new software development framework, applying it to a substantial number of real-world software projects in two different industrial software development environments and thereby demonstrating its effectiveness. METHODS. Based on a review of the available research approaches and strategies, the researcher selected 'pragmatism' as the most suitable for this research. This selection was driven by two contributory factors. The first was that in order to conduct the research the researcher would have active participation in the majority of the research activities. The second was that the deliverables from the research should be immediately useable for the benefit of software practitioners and hence not be regarded as a theoretical framework. The approach was further refined by adopting Action Research and Case Study strategies. The research was divided in to stages each of which was executed within separate companies. The companies were very different in terms of their business areas, culture and views on quality and specifically quality of software deliverables. RESULTS. The research findings provided a strong indication that a holistic software development framework does provide an improvement in software project deliverables quality and repeatability in terms of schedules and quality. In the case of Fisher–Rosemount it enabled them to attain ISO 9000/Ticket accreditation. In addition, by providing all processes and tools in a single web based environment the adoption by software developers, project managers and senior management was very high

An investigation into the application of systematic software reuse in a project-centric organisation

The software development continues to become more competitive and demanding, placing pressure on developers. Changes in the international political climate have resulted in shrinking military budgets, putting developers of defence software under further pressure. At present, systematic reuse is probably the most realistic way of addressing this pressure by improving software development productivity and quality. Software product line (SPL) engineering provides a comprehensive approach to systematic software reuse and is becoming widely accepted. The focus of this interpretive case study was ground station software development in a small multidisciplinary project-centric company which produces avionics systems for military aircraft. The purpose of the study was to investigate the potential implementation of systematic software reuse in the company. The study consisted of three phases, a literature study, a contextualisation and a set of field interviews, and used elements of the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Product Line Practice Framework to examine the suitability of SPL engineering for the company. The findings of the study highlight the potential challenges that SPL engineering poses for the company, and emphasise how the company's project-centric structure could impede its implementation of systematic software reuse.ComputingM.Sc. (Information Systems