Supporting the Investigation and Planning of Pragmatic Reuse Tasks

Software reuse has long been promoted as a means to increase developer productivity; however, reusing source code is difficult in practice and tends to be performed in an ad hoc manner. This is problematic because poor decisions can be made either to attempt an unwise, overly complex reuse task, or to avoid a reuse task that would have saved time and effort. This paper describes a lightweight tool that supports the investigation and planning of pragmatic reuse tasks. The tool helps developers to identify the dependencies from the source code they wish to reuse, and to decide how to deal with those dependencies. Questions about pragmatic reuse are evaluated through a survey of industrial developers. The tool is evaluated through the planning and execution of reuse tasks by industrial developers.