Analytical and Empirical Evaluation
of Software Reuse Metrics
by
Prem Devanbu,
Sakke Karstu,
Walcélio L. Melo and
William Thomas
In Proc. of the 18th Int'l Conf. on Software
Engineering, Berlin, Germany, 1996. IEEE Press.
Also available as a Technical Report, University of Maryland, Department
of Computer Science, College Park, MD, 20770. July 1995. CS-TR-3505.
(Also available as UMIACS-95-82).
Abstract:
How much can be saved by using pre-existing (or somewhat modified)
software components when developing new software systems? With the increasing
adoption of reuse methods and technologies, this question becomes
critical. However, directly tracking the actual cost savings due to
reuse is difficult. A worthy goal would be to develop a method of
measuring the savings indirectly by analyzing the code for reuse
of components. The focus of this paper is to evaluate how
well several published software reuse metrics measure the ``time,
money and quality'' benefits of software reuse. We conduct this
evaluation both analytically and empirically. On the
analytic front, we first develop some properties that should arguably
hold of any measure of ``time, money and quality'' benefit due to
reuse. We assess several existing software reuse metrics using these
properties. Empirically, we constructed a toolset (using GEN++)
to gather data on all published reuse metrics from C++ code; then,
using some productivity and quality data from ``nearly replicated''
student projects at the University of Maryland, we evaluate the
relationship the known metrics and the process data. The results show
that different reuse metrics can be used as predictors of different
quality attributes, and suggest possible directions for improving the
known measures.
Copyright 1996 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the 18th
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-18), March
25-29, 1996, Berlin, Germnay. Personal use of this material is
permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for
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Last updated on March 30, 1999 by
Walcélio Melo