Comments on "More success and failure factors in software reuse"

For original paper see ibid., p. 474. This is a clear example of how research in software engineering can progress when empirical methods are applied. Menzies and Di Stefano apply a number of data mining tools to the data set. While, inmost cases, their results are in agreement with ours, in some cases they are not. Our first and main observation is that our interpretation of the data set is based not only on the data set itself but also on the knowledge gathered during the interviews with project members. The main problem with the data set is its size: 23 data points. Although this data set is the largest one available about reuse projects, it is too limited to base analysis only on data mining techniques; data mining is usually applied to data sets with thousands if not millions of data points.