A Brief Overview of Software Reuse and Metrics in Software Engineering

This paper focuses on the importance of software reuse and metrics in software engineering. Software reuse is the process of reusing parts or all of an existing software system, architecture, or methodology to develop new software, potentially with different functionality. Software reuse metrics involve the different methods of ensuring that the reuse components are of the right quality, and reuse metrics serve to expose and predict the defects in the reusable process. In this paper, we introduced the concept of software reuse while exploring its merits and demerits, the types, and the impact of software reuse. From a survey outlook, we observed that high cost incurred whilst troubleshooting a reuse component and the difficulty integrating with development tools are some of the many potential problems associated with software reuse. In addition, we discussed software reuse metrics, the need for metrics, and their importance to software reuse (and its potential problems and solutions), and stakeholders in the software engineering process. Some of the issues discussed are case studies involving common software packages, object-oriented programming and its relationship to reuse, and the types of reuse metrics. Having presented an expository account of software reuse and metrics, this paper then provides recommendations for real world applications and future research