Abstract: "Reuse of existing software components plays an important role in increasing the quality of software products and the productivity of software development. The measurement of levels of software reuse is necessary to monitor improvements in software reuse. This paper presents a set of measurable reuse attributes appropriate to object oriented systems, and a suite of metrics which quantify these attributes. Metrics suitable for the object based language Ada are identified and a prototype measurement tool design is proposed."

Observers in the present usually have an advantage when it comes to interpreting events of the past. In the case of software reuse, how ever, it is unclear why an idea that has gained such universal accep tance was the source of swirling controversy when it began to be taken seriously by the software engineering community in the mid-1980's. From a purely conceptual point of view, the reuse of software de signs and components promises nearly risk-free benefits to the devel oper. Virtually every model of software cost and development effort predicts first-order dependencies on either products size or the num ber of steps carried out in development. Reduce the amount of new product to be developed and the cost of producing the product de creases. Remove development steps, and total effort is reduced. By reusing previously developed engineering products the amount of new product and the number of development steps can be reduced. In this way, reuse clearly has a major influence on reducing total development cost and effort. This, of course, raises the issue of from whence the reused products arise. There has to be a prior investment in creating "libraries of reuse products before reuse can be successfuL . . " How can organizations with a "bottom line" orientation be enticed into contributing to a reuse venture? Fortunately, the economics of reuse l resembles many other financial investment situations .

Published in 1993. Software reuse has been shown to achieve improvements in productivity, quality and timeliness of software. The collection of papers in this book were given at a seminar organized by UNICOM and the British Computer Society Software Reuse Specialist Group. They address the reasons why software reuse can maximize an organization's return from past expenditure and ensure a good future expenditure. Increasing the automation of software development requires access to explicit knowledge about processes and products involved. The chapters examine the relationship between reuse and other aspects of software engineering, including management techniques and structures, CASE, methodologies and object orientation. In addition, the papers aim to provide a structures insight into new techniques which will become available through the 1990s. This text is suitable for software managers and directors, software engineers, software professionals, academics, and other involved in software engineering research.

Abstract: "The analysis and measurement of current levels of software reuse are necessary to monitor improvements. This paper provides a framework for the derivation of measures of software reuse and introduces several definitions, attributes, and abstractions of potentially measurable reuse properties. The framework is applied to the problem of measuring reuse in object oriented systems which support 'leveraged' reuse through inheritance. I describe the importance of the perspective of the observer when analyzing, measuring, and profiling reuse. Three perspectives are examined: the server perspective, the client perspective, and the system perspective. Candidate reuse metrics are proposed from each perspective."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Reuse, ICSR-6, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2000. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on generative reuse and formal description languages, object-oriented methods, product line architectures, requirements reuse and business modeling, components and libraries, and design patterns.

The book provides a clear understanding of what software reuse is, where the problems are, what benefits to expect, the activities, and its different forms. The reader is also given an overview of what sofware components are, different kinds of components and compositions, a taxonomy thereof, and examples of successful component reuse. An introduction to software engineering and software process models is also provided.