A comparative study on software reuse metrics and economic models from a traceability perspective

Abstract

A fundamental task when employing software reuse is evaluating its impacts by measuring the relation of reused and developed software, the cost for obtaining reuse and the cost avoided by reusing software during development and maintenance. Different reuse related metrics exist in the literature, varying from strictly code-based metrics, aiming to measure the amount of code reused in a product, to more elaborate cost-based metrics and models, aiming to measure the costs involved in reuse programs and to evaluate the impacts of reuse in software development. Although reuse is commonly claimed to benefit maintenance, the traceability problem is still neglected on the reuse metrics arena, despite its great impacts on software maintenance. Reuse metrics may be used as important support tools for dealing with the traceability between reused assets and their clients. The goal of this work is to evaluate the current state of the art on the reuse metrics area with special emphasis on code-based metrics, building on previous surveys with further analysis and considerations on the applicability of such metrics to reuse traceability.