Study

Methodology

Key Findings

[43]

Surveys

Effective reuse depends not only on finding and reusing components, but also on the ways those components are combined. The researcher refers to this process as “packaging”, noting how it can be technical difficult to match up the packaging and ensure a system using reused components works as intended. Unfortunately, these styles and packaging distinctions are often implicit; as a consequence, components with appropriate functionality may fail to work together.

[44]

Surveys (51 Questions)

Well documented software/system architectures are essential to support decision-making about reuse, required to correctly integrate the different assets, thus reducing testing time. A business needs to be well prepared to identify, handle and adapt reused software for their own business needs. There needs to be that technical expertise within the business, or there is the risk that a business is using reused components which they do not fully understand; leading to issues related to reliability, legal protection, security and performance.

[44]

Testing reliability of reused software components

Highlighted that some software components used in software are not fully functional, and used in a way which was not intended. Issue is that those using these reused components or assets may not fully understand them.

[45]

Analysis of 24 software reuse projects between 1994-1997 in European countries

A third of the projects tracked ultimately failed.

Three main causes of failure were 1) not introducing reuse-specific processes, 2) not modifying non-reuse processes, and 3) not considering human factors. The root cause of these issues was a lack of commitment from top management along with the belief that the business did not need to further adapt or engineer these reused components to fit their business needs; instead believing they could simply be taken from a repository and used.

[21]

Extensive literature review

Legal issues surrounding software reuse can be summarize into three types of protection, namely patents, trademarks and author law. Businesses may shy away from using reused components because of the legal risks, and the financial repercussions there could be.