Systematically selecting a software module during opportunistic reuse

Opportunistic reuse, a need based sourcing of software modules without any prior plan is a common practice in software development. It is popular due to rapid productivity improvement and fewer impediments while undertaking reuse task. However, developers use informal criteria to select an external module for reuse. The composition of such a module may introduce undesirable emergent behavior due to new or unknown design decisions. Hence, we propose to systematize selection of an external module by defining selection criteria based on extracted design decisions from source code. This would help developers in making informed selection of external modules there by avoiding or being aware of design mismatches when reusing opportunistically.