The Quantitative Measurement of Software Components Reusability: Methods, Applications, Challenges

Abstract

The main goal of reusing software components is to produce new software systems using existing components rather than building it from scratch. Component-based software development is one of the most common approaches found today in different branches of engineering, but in software engineering reusing components is still faced with numerous challenges. In order to increase efficiency and accelerate the adoption of component reuse in software development, quantitative measurement of component reusability is necessary. In this regard, various models and metrics have been proposed, so it is important to review the research literature on this concept fairly and comprehensively. In this paper, we conducted a systematic review to identify and evaluate the methods that have been used for measuring component reusability and provide a new classification. Finally, based on the results of studies carried out, some of the relating challenges and issues have been introduced.

Keywords

• software components reusability
• component based software development
• quantitative measurement
• black box evaluation methods
• white box evaluation methods