A Method for Analyzing and Visualizing Intermodule Relations to Support the Reuse-Based Embedded Software Development

The number of lines of code in embedded software has been growing. In reuse-based embedded software development, there are more and more cases in which software from two or more products is combined. The reuse of existing software has thus become inevitable. However, if the existing software to be reused is not well managed or organized, there is no way to know which modules will be affected when some parts of the reused software are modified. In this paper, we propose a method to accomplish the effective reuse of software modules by managing dependency information among modules and adding development management property data to each module. We have developed a configuration management tool that visualizes the mutual relations among existing software modules and visually presents not only the dependencies among modules but also the development management property data of the modules based on the developer's demand for the reuse of modules. We evaluated the method by applying it to some actual development projects.