Reusability affecting factors and software metrics for reusability: A systematic literature review
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2021
Abstract
Measuring and estimating the reusability of software components is important towards finding reusable candidates. Researchers have shown that software metrics can be effectively used to assess software reusability. This work provides a systematic literature review to investigate the main factors that influence software reusability and how these identified factors can be quantified using software metrics. This paper also investigates tool availability of the identified software metrics. Based on the extensive study, we narrowed down 44 factors that could positively or negatively affect the reusability of software systems. In term of software metrics, we report our findings through five main families of metrics, namely coupling, cohesion, complexity, inheritance, and size. We found that most of the metrics examine reusability at the class-level, and the availability of software tools is limited. Furthermore, not all reusability affecting factors are equally impactful to assess the reusability of software components. While existing studies often discussed the impact of complexity towards software reusability, we found that only a handful of complexity metrics were meant for assessing reusability. We have identified several open challenges and gaps in the area, in particular lack of quantifiable measurement for reusability, limited software tools, and limited metrics that directly measure reusability.
Keywords
Reusability affecting factors, Software metrics, Software quality, Software reusability, Systematic literature review
Divisions
Software
Funders
Ministry of Education, Malaysia (FRGS/1/2018/ICT01/MUSM/03/1)
Publication Title
Software: Practice and Experience
Volume
51
Issue
6
Publisher
Wiley
Publisher Location
111 RIVER ST, HOBOKEN 07030-5774, NJ USA