A Study of Factors Affecting the Design and Use of Reusable Components

Design for Reuse: Designing and building components to be reusable is a key area in software reuse research. Practitioners and researchers need to address the problem of how to build reusable components. We will study design principles that can be applied to make components reusable. These design principles are language and domain independent. With an empirical study we will identify the most commonly used reuse design principles. This can be a guideline for designing and building reusable components. Re-engineering a component to be reusable by applying the reuse design principles is a cumbersome task. It is important to understand the overhead involved in making components reusable. We will conduct an empirical study analyzing the overhead in terms of component size, effort required, number of parameters, and productivity. Design with Reuse: Reusing components in a system involves many challenges. Successful reuse of the components depends on how easily a user can use them in the system. It is important to understand the factors that affect the ease of reuse. Through an empirical study, we will analyze the relationships between the size of a component, the reuse design principles used in building the component, and the ease of reuse. We will also analyze the relationship between human factors and the ease of reuse. The human factors considered are the experiences of the user in software programming, software reuse, and programming language. We will also analyze whether testing a component makes it easier to reuse or not.