Reusability Assessment of Open Source Components for Software Product Lines

Software product lines and open source software are two emerging paradigms in software engineering. A common theme in both of these paradigms is „reuse‟. Software product lines are a reuse centered approach that makes use of existing assets to develop new products. At the moment, a motivation for using open source software is so as to gain access to source code, which can then be reused. The product line community is being attracted to open source components. The use of open source software in software product lines is not for one time reuse but, being a core asset, the component is intended to be used repeatedly for the development of other products in the family. In this paper the results of an exploratory study is presented; it was conducted to explore the factors affecting the reusability of open source components. On the basis of the results of the exploratory study a reusability attribute model is presented which makes use of established object oriented metrics accompanied with newly defined metrics. The assessment using the proposed metrics is compared with the rankings assigned by human evaluators