Feature prioritization for analyzing and enhancing software reusability

Software reuse plays an important role in the development of new software, due to its potential benefits, which include increased product quality and decreased product cost and schedule. Although software industry has been going through a tremendous development in recent decades, component reuse is still facing numerous challenges and lacking adoption by practitioners. One of the impediments preventing efficient and effective reuse is the difficulty to determine which artifacts are best suited to solve a particular problem in a given context and how easy it will be to reuse. Nevertheless, a good understanding of reusability as well as adequate and easy to use metrics for quantification of reusability are necessary to simplify and accelerate the adoption of component reuse in software development. An analysis of the various attributes from the organization, development and complexity perspective, an optimized group of properties are proposed here. This will help to define the reusability measurement factor. These factors are experimented and validated on a dataset of NASA´s MDP (Metric Data Program) data repository, resulting with very promising performances.