Management Issues and Software Reuse: An Empirical Study

Lewis, John A. and Henry, Sallie M. and Kafura, Dennis G. and Schulman, Robert S. (1992) Management Issues and Software Reuse: An Empirical Study. Technical Report TR-92-16, Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a controlled experiment designed to evaluate the impact of managerial influence and cognitive abilities on software reuse. The experiment concludes that (1) software reuse promotes higher productivity, (2) reuse resulting from both moderate and strong encouragement promote higher productivity than no reuse, (3) management's strong encouragement to reuse tends to promote improper reuse activities, (4) in general, reuse of a module is unproductive if 30 percent or less is used for the target system, though as much as 50 percent can be discarded for some modules and still be worth reusing, (5) of integrative ability, perception speed, and visualization, only the ability to visualize changes made to patterns was related to software reuse, and (6) of the subject's prior experience, only the amount of testing experience was related to software reuse.