Analytical Analysis of Generic Reusability: Weyuker’s Properties

Reusability is the key concept in today’s software development environment. The concept of reusability can be achieved by Generic programming approach. C++ templates help us to develop generic code which results in reusable software modules and also identify effectiveness of this reuse strategy. Many researchers have already developed various reusability metrics [9] [7]. In this paper we emphasis on evaluating reusability metrics on weyuker’s set of properties. Weyuker’s list of properties has always been a point of reference and suggested as a guiding tool in identification of a good complexity measure by several researchers. We have chosen some recently reported reusability metrics Method Template Inheritance Factor (MTIF) and Attribute Template Inheritance factor (ATIF) and evaluated them against Weyuker’s set of principles. We divide our work in a two-step framework. In the first step the metrics are analytically evaluated against a formal list of Weyuker’s properties and in the second step we calculate LOC metric value by using three different programs designed using template and inheritance features of object-oriented programming and observe that by using template with inheritance property we can reduce number of lines of a project to a great extent.