Overview

The effective reuse of software products is a goal many businesses have been trying to achieve in recent years. Due to the high costs and variable time required to develop high-quality applications [9], businesses find the idea of reusing previous high-quality code to be very appealing. However, as of yet software reuse has not been as effective as expected and thus not broadly used in industry. It becomes necessary to estimate the business costs and benefits of reuse in order to determine the incentives businesses and individuals have to adopt a reuse methodology.

Historically, studies to quantify the amount of software reuse taking place in businesses focused on the repackaging and reapplication of code modules, data structures, or entire applications in new software projects. [12]. However, there are many benefits that can be realized through the reuse of all artifacts created during the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This includes "domain modeling and requirements specification, as well as project organization and methodolgy, development processes, and communication structures." [4]

If a company can encapsulate the many different types of artifacts created during the development cycle, it must then implement the proper incentives to motivate its employees to use those artifacts. It is important that any measure of software reuse includes the incentives in place to promote software reuse.