Reuse Environments for Software Artifacts: Analysis Framework

Systematic software reuse facilitates achieving quality software, faster and at a lower cost. Software reuse environments play an important role in exploiting reusable artifacts to the extent. Environments that support reusing early-stage software artifacts are of great interest. There have been a number of reuse environments proposed in the literature for reuse of software artifacts. However, there is no framework to allow analyzing (i.e. classifying and comparing) reuse environments. The significance of such a framework is twofold: (1) to be used by reuse practitioners to select appropriate environment; and (2) to be used by researchers to identify gaps for future research. In this paper, we present an attribute-based framework to provide such aid to practitioners and researchers. The paper also presents an indicative survey of current reuse environments proposed for systematic reuse of software artifacts. We use the framework to analyze those reuse environments. The analysis provides an understanding of current systematic reuse approaches and respective reuse environments; and identifies corresponding shortcomings. Consequently, we post research questions for future work.