Experimental Evaluation of a Reusability-Oriented Parallel Programming Environment

Abslruct-This paper reports on the initial experimental evaluation of the Reusability-Oriented Parallel programming Environment (ROPE 1, a software component reuse system developed at the University of Texas at Austin. ROPE helps the designer find and understand compo vents by using a new classification method called structured relational classification. ROPE is a part of a development environment for pat allel programs which uses a declarative/hierarchical graphical programming interface. This interface allows use of components with differeltt levels of abstraction, ranging from design units to actual code moduhs. ROPE supports reuse of all of the component types defined in the Ilevelopment environment. The experimental design included metrics such as fraction of code in a program consisting of reused components, development time and error rates, and qualitative metrics such as user satisfaction and user perceived utility. The subjects for the experiments were undergraduate and graduate students in the Departments of Computer Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The development time was drastically cut for all programs and the average fraction of code in a given program which was reused from the RC PE library was about 80 percent. Programs developed with the aid of XOPE were found to have error rates far less than those developed vv ithout ROPE. These results, while gratifying, are not surprising. They show that ROPE attains a high level of reuse for programs of mocest size and complexity. These experiments are the necessary first st’:p in a systematic evaluation of reuse in the CODE/ROPE environn ent.