Layer assessment of object-oriented software: A metric facilitating white-box reuse

Abstract

Software reuse has the potential to shorten delivery times, improve quality and reduce development costs. However software reuse has been proven challenging for most organizations. The challenges involve both organizational and technical issues. In this work we concentrate on the technical issues and we propose a new metric facilitating the reuse of object-oriented software based on the popular Chidamber and Kemerer suite for object-oriented design. We derive this new metric using linear regression on a number of OSS java projects. We compare and contrast this new metric with three other metrics proposed in the literature. The purpose of the proposed metric is to assist a software developer during the development of a software system in achieving reusability of classes considered important for future reuse and also in providing assistance during re-architecting and componentization activities of existing systems.