1,720,965 research outputs found
The Cost of Standardizing Components for Software Reuse
No full textSoftware reuse can be an important step towards increasing productivity and quality. A necessary condition for its success is standardization of reusable components at each level of the software lifecycle. Standardization can be looked at in two different ways: externally (the interface), and internally (functionality).
Both of these are fundamental, and imply extra costs in the development of components. The external perspective is the usual one—it considers the
appearance of the components and the ways they are related to the rest of the world. The internal perspective is strongly related to reuse: here a component is considered standard when its functionality is common among all systems belonging to a particular domain; such components are usually discovered following domain analysis. A qualitative analysis of these two approaches to standards and reuse led us to a simple model showing the extra costs of standardizing reusable software component
Analysing the Return of Investment of Reuse
No full textSoftware reuse can be very useful in increasing the productivity and the quality level of a company, but the costs of this kind of investment are not always covered by the advantages it brings. It is particularly important to be able to correctly analyze the cost implied by software reuse in order to decide whether to adopt it or not. Even when a reuse policy has been adopted, reuse is not always the right solution and there are situations in which it is more convenient to develop a component from scratch. It is difficult to obtain a mathematical model for the evaluation of the effort required by the adaptation of a component in a new context. A different approach is proposed where the estimation is made using the knowledge and the experience gained from previous cases and stored in an ad-hoc base
A Fuzzy Approach to Faceted Classification and Retrieval of Reusable Software Components
No full textSoftware reuse can be very useful in increasing the productivity and the quality level of a company, but appropriate classification and retrieval tools have to be provided in order to exploit its pros. The classic classification and retrieval methods based upon a controlled, fixed vocabulary are not very flexible and can be unsatisfactory in many cases, especially when the specification are not fully defined. An improvement in this sense can be obtained applying some simple fuzzy concepts to the well known faceted classification method. Such a method based upon the same structures used in the traditional faceted classification is described. The method allows the user to specify how much a keyword is representative of the searched components, giving the means to specify the undesired keywords, too, through a set of fuzzy attributes
A Taxonomy for Identifying a Software Component from Uncertain and Partial Specification
No full textMorphogenesis of a Program
No full textThe software crisis has led to sevcral models that
describc whole or parts of the software development process.
This paper introduces a model which formally describes the
later stages of this cycle where the code is modified. The code
is treated as a simple string without any semantic or syntactic
meaning. A set of operations to manipulate strings is defined,
then five operators describing the more usual changes
undergone by the code are introduced. A set of properties
which allows to reduce the number of transformations needed
to pass from a version of the code to another one is
introduced. Then the operators are extended in order to grant
their invertibility and their inverse versions are defined.
Finally a tool which implements the changes described by the
operators, keeps trace of the transformations and allows to
navigate through the versions of the code, is described
Reuse and Reusability Metrics in an Object Oriented Paradigm
No full textThe connection between reuse and object oriented programming (OOP) is outlined. Although both claim the same benefits, object oriented programming can see reuse as a test demontrating that the job of OOP has been done. Reuse metrics are seen as essential in measuring the quality of object oriented designs and codes
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