Code Reuse Through Reflection: An Empirical Perspective

Applying reuse-supporting techniques has the potential for increasing software productivity, shortening development time and decreasing maintenance costs. However, at present, there is no methodology incorporating reuse as a standard development practice and the question of which factors affect reuse, their level of significance and assessment is still a controversial issue. Code reuse, on the other hand, can be measured objectively using suitable metrics. In this paper, we adapt code reuse metrics proposed for procedural languages to object-oriented languages and use these metrics to assess an approach to enhance code reuse employing reflective techniques. The proposed approach consists of, firstly, identification and re-factoring of certain aspects of applications; secondly, re-implementing these aspects in a generic manner thus making them reusable, and, finally, composing the re-factored aspects with the rest of the application to recover the original behaviour.