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

Software Reuse in Information Systems Development

Software and Management Information Systems application development have become a key area to the performance of most firms. The reuse of previously written code is a way to increase software development productivity as well as the quality of the software (Basili, et al., 1996; Gaffney and Durek, 1989). If previously tested components are reused in a new software project, they are more likely to be error free than new components. This reduces the overall failure rate of the software project. Case studies, such as (Banker and Kauffman, 1991; Poulin, et al., 1993; Apte, et al., 1990; Lim, 1994; Swanson, et al., 1991) were instrumental in obtaining such insights. Today, an increasing number of organizations are adopting the practice of software reuse (Lim, 1994). A common misconception is that object-orientation alone will lead to reuse. While it can help facilitating a reuse approach, research has shown that object technology does not always lead to reuse (Fichman and Kemerer, 1997). Software reuse requires a substantial up-front investment for the development and maintenance of a software repository with reusable components (Barnes and Bollinger, 1991). A large part of the set-up cost comes from the fact that additional effort is needed to make regular components generic enough for use in future projects (Mili, et al., 1994). In the long-run, this initial investment can be offset by the cost savings through reuse. Using a reusable component in lieu of writing a new component from scratch saves development cost. However, the component has to be located and retrieved from the repository. Often, components cannot be used as is, but also need to be modified to fit the context of the new project. Reuse can only be economically viable, if the savings achieved through reuse will over time offset the start-up cost of implementing the reuse methodology and populating the software repository. While software reuse is not a new research area to computer science (Krueger, 1992), MIS research has only recently begun to investigate this important aspect of software development. This reflects an increased understanding that too little work has been done on nontechnical issues (Zand and Samadzadeh, 1995). Organizational and behavioral aspects, legal constraints, and economic considerations are little explored in the context of software reuse. IS research can also contribute to storage and retrieval problem by developing domain specific solutions. In this overview we summarize the work done in the areas most important to IS research

Effort Estimation Factors for Corrective Software Maintenance Projects: A Qualitative Analysis of Estimation Criteria

In this paper, we identify factors that impact software maintenance effort by exploring expert software maintenance estimators’ knowledge about corrective maintenance projects. We use a qualitative approach to identify the issues important to these experts to derive their effort estimates. We find seventeen factors (rated and rank ordered by importance) that affect corrective maintenance effort and include constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. Several of these factors that have a comparably strong influence on corrective maintenance estimation are unique to corrective maintenance and are not generally observed in established software estimation models. The results enhance organizations’ ability to effectively manage maintenance environments by focusing attention on the identified areas. For future research, these results represent an important step toward developing a comprehensive and accurate corrective maintenance effort estimation model

Identifying Effort Estimation Factors for Corrective Maintenance in Object-Oriented Systems

This research explores the decision-making process of expert estimators of corrective maintenance projects by usingqualitative methods to identify the factors that they use in deriving estimates. We implement a technique called causalmapping, which allows us to identify the cognitive links between the information that estimators use, and the estimates thatthey produce based on that information. Results suggest that a total of 17 factors may be relevant for corrective maintenanceeffort estimation, covering constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. This line of research aims ataddressing the limitations of existing maintenance estimation models that do not incorporate a number of soft factors, thus,achieving less accurate estimates than human experts

A Platform-based Design Approach for Flexible Software Components

We develop a design method that promotes flexible component design based on a common component platform with various plug-ins. The approach increases the flexibility and expandability of software components, which improves their reuse opportunities. We argue that such a flexible component design can expand reuse from relatively small infrastructure items, such as user interfaces, printing functionality, and data access modules, to the core of the application domain. Reusing such domain-specific items helps realize the true value of component-based software development. Following a design science research approach, we evaluated the component design method by assessing its correctness and its application to different scenarios. We also recruited a panel of experts to assess it

IT Shared Service Center and External Market Activities

In the last few years many corporate groups reorganized their IT-Services and established IT Shared Service Centers (IT SSC). These IT SSCs primarily delivered IT services internally; nevertheless some IT SSC provided IT services to external customers as well. These external market activities failed in most cases. In spite of the relevance to organizations, little research has been done investigating the reasons for such failures. In order to address this issue, we have conducted a qualitative study with eight IT SSC cases and five experts interviews. We have triangulated the results between the case studies and the expert interviews and we have identified two set of factors, one explaining IT SCC successes in internal markets and the other explaining IT SSC failures in external markets. The enabling factors for the successes of IT SSCs in internal markets include having the same corporate culture, knowledge of the parent organization and its processes, lower transactions cost, lower average cost, no dependence on external IT service providers, better data protection, improved IT opportunities and obligation to provide services. The factors explaining external market failures include the lack of experience with acquisition, no professional sales and marketing, lack of investment funds, weak unique features of IT services, reassessment of strategic group portfolio by the parent company, higher IT service costs, and inconsistent business models. These findings are relevant to managers of IT SSCs to make decisions on their corporate strategy, as well as to researchers to utilize these findings as a starting point for future research on IT SSCs