The current trend of open source development and outsourcing industry heavily banks upon the reusability of software for achieving consistency in quality and optimization of cost. Hence, software developers require excellent support in the assessment of the reusability levels of the software that they are trying to develop. This chapter introduces a method which will analyze the object oriented software design and calculate the possible reusability level of that software module. It measures the structural properties of software using design metrics and transforms those measures to reusability levels associated with that package. This scheme brings out a novel data driven-methodology, which can predict the reusability of a software system at its design phase itself and provide a feedback to the design architect to improve the design appropriately to achieve better reusable and cost effective software products.
Software Reusability: Approaches and Challenges
