Tool Assisted Empirical Approach to Reusability Models Assessment.

In software development, reuse became an important aspect in increasing productivity and performance and in reducing costs. The extend to which software can be reused have been captured by several reusability assessment models proposed in literature. In this chapter we propose an empirical analysis of three reusability models with the scope of long term evaluation of reusability in open source software. We successfully reproduced the models and applied them to several versions of large Java open source projects. We investigate the long term evolution of reusability, its relation to metrics and other quality factors. Results show a significant difference in the reusability models, but reflect a clear influence of complexity, cohesion, coupling, size and documentation.