A study of reusability, complexity, and reuse design principles

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement pp. 161 - 164
• Main Authors: Anguswamy, Reghu, Frakes, William B.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 19.09.2012; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Complexity theory; Documentation; empirical study; Productivity; Programming; reusability; reuse design; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development techniques > Reusability; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Software libraries and repositories; Software engineering; Software reusability; Software reuse; empirical study; reusability; software reuse; reuse design
• ISBN: 9781450310567; 1450310567
• ISSN: 1949-3770
• DOI: 10.1145/2372251.2372280

A study is reported on the relationship of complexity and reuse design principles with the reusability of code components. Reusability of a component is measured as the ease of reuse as perceived by the subjects reusing the component. Thirty-four subjects participated in the study with each subject reusing 5 components, resulting in 170 cases of reuse. The components were randomly assigned to the subjects from a pool of 25 components which were designed and built for reuse. The relationship between the complexity of a component and the ease of reuse was analyzed by a regression analysis. It was observed that the higher the complexity the lower the ease of reuse, but the correlation is not significant. An analysis of the relationship between a set of reuse design principles, used in designing and building the components, and the ease of reuse is also reported. The reuse design principles: well-defined interface, and clarity and understandability significantly increase the ease of reuse, while documentation does not have a significant impact on the ease of reuse.