Characteristics of Software Reuse Strategies:

Planned reuse of software artifacts can improve productivity and quality in software development, however, a planned reuse effort requires substantial investments in the process and the software repository. In case of failure of a reuse effort, the initial expenses may not be recovered. The likelihood of success may vary with the reuse strategy employed; hence, potential reuse adopters must be able to understand reuse strategy alternatives and their implications. This research identifies the characteristics of systematic software reuse strategies and evaluates how they contribute to a successful reuse program using survey data collected from seventy-one software development groups. Our results show that these characteristics cluster into five distinct reuse strategies and that each strategy has a different potential for success. Index Terms reusability, systematic software reuse, software process improvement, quality, reuse success, reuse classification scheme This manuscript is currently under revision for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Please do not cite without the authors’ permission.