Contextual reusability metrics for event-based architectures

Component based software engineering has been perceived to have immense reuse potential. This area has evoked wide interest and has led to considerable investment in research and development effort. Most of these investigations have explored internal characteristics of software components such as correctness, reliability, maintainability, modularity, understandability, readability, interoperability, portability, generality and genericity for promoting reuse. But experience over the past decade has demonstrated that the usefulness of a component depends as much on the context into which it fits as it does on the internal characteristics of the component. This context takes into account the requirements of the domain and an architectural description is a useful way of representing that domain. In this paper, we present a set of reusability metrics designed to measure how well a software component fits into such an architectural context.