Requirements Reuse: The State of the Practice

For several decades, software reuse has been a recognized solution to improving efficiency of software development. However, implementing reuse in practice remains challenging, and the IT community has little visibility into the state of the practice specifically as it pertains to reusing software requirements. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted in the global IT industry in 2010 and discusses the state of the practice for software requirements reuse. The survey studies reuse adoption in two different contexts, i.e., Software Product Lines and Software Maintenance. The analysis of the survey data focuses on the latter context as a more common case in practice and investigates the impact of various factors on reuse adoption and effectiveness.