A Survey of Methods for Measuring and Enhancing Component Reusability

One of the most interesting issues in Component-Based Software Engineering is definitively component reusability. Component reuse is an approach that provides many advantages towards the process of building new components for large complex systems. Component reusability consists of some functionalities related to components such as adaptability, reliability and other features. These features are very important for the software component reusability evaluation. Some research papers have proposed several solutions for evaluating component reusability in the best possible way. Most of them have introduced methods that provide an accurate estimation of reusability and ways how to enhance it further. In this paper, we review three of these methods: COR (Component Overall Reusability), Coupling-Cohesion and CRECOR (Component Repository for Facilitating Enterprise JavaBeans Component Reuse). Our goal is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Moreover, we focus on comparing qualitative aspects of reusability such as adaptability or reliability as well. It is expected that CRECOR should provide more advantages in terms of reusability features due to the fact that it includes some extra-functionalities that are missing in COR and CouplingCohesion methods. However, each method has its own strong points that will be analyzed in the paper.