Reusability of Interfaces for Component-Based Software Development

Abstract

As organizations implement systematic software reuse programs to improve productivity and quality, they must be able to measure their progress and identify the most effective reuse strategies. This is done with reuse metrics and models. Reusability of interfaces has now become more generalized approach for application development. The main advantages of this are reduced development time, cost and efforts along with several others. These advantages are mainly contributed by the reuse of already built-in software components. In order to realize the reuse of components effectively in interfaces, it is required to measure the reusability of components.Paper proposes several reusability metrics in terms of cost and productivity like Reuse cost avoidance, Reuse value added and Additional development cost, which can be used significantly for business applications. Component-based software development relies on reusable components in order to improve quality and flexibility of products as well as increasing development productivity. This paradigm promotes deployment of reusable components as black-box units that can only work and communicate with one another through their well defined interfaces. In this paper, understandability of component interfaces is considered as a major quality affecting reusability of software components. A set of metrics for measuring properties believed to be relevant to understandability and reusability of software components are presented. Then, their usefulness and relevance are analyzed based upon data gathered from the measurement of a variety of component interfaces. The paper concludes with some ideas for further research in this area.