Quantifying reuse in OSS:A large-scale empirical study

Reuse is an established software development practice, whose benefits have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners. In order for software reuse to advance from an opportunistic activity to a well-defined, systematic state of practice, the reuse phenomenon should be empirically studied in a real-world environment. To this end, OSS projects consist a fitting context for this purpose. In this paper, the authors aim at assessing the: (a) strategy and intensity of reuse activities in OSS development, (b)effect of reuse activities on design quality, (c) modification of reuse decisions from a chronological viewpoint and (d) effect of these modifications on software design quality. In order to achieve these goals, the authors performed a large-scale embedded multi-case study on 1,111 Java projects, extracted from Google Code repository. The results of the case study provide a valuable insight on reuse processes in OSS development, that can be exploited by both researchers and practitioners.