Reusability Problems of Object- Oriented Software Building Blocks

There is no doubt that the object-oriented paradigm (encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism and dynamic binding) encourages the building of extensible systems and software reuse. Nevertheless, the desired reusability of software components often cannot be achieved even by using state-of-the-art class libraries/application frameworks or object-oriented programming in general. Based on a large-scale project (objectoriented implementation of a graphic user interface prototyping tool) we identified some problems that arise in reusing object-oriented software building blocks. This paper explains the concepts of object-oriented software building blocks and discusses the most striking reusability problems of such components.