Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lee, Nam Yong

Titel

An empirical study of software reuse processes and reusable software components with special attention to Ada

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1993

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Over the past several decades, numerous software technologies have been developed for overcoming the software crisis. Among these technologies, reuse has been recognized as one of the most important software technologies. Recently, reuse has gained substantial attention as a possible solution to the software crisis in the Ada and other software communities. This study examined how organizations actually exploit reuse technologies and evaluates how reuse factors affect reusability in an organization. This dissertation is an attempt to enhance the measurement of reusability and the effectiveness of reuse by establishing a theoretical background for reuse in Ada and by conducting an empirical investigation of organizations using Ada technologies. Based on the literature review, this study differentiated all variables related to reuse into eight categories: domain, process, human, tool, component, organizational, software metric, and environmental categories. A research framework for reuse and three major hypotheses were proposed on the basis of the literature review. A mail questionnaire was used to survey five hundred Ada professionals from the mailing lists of Ada Information Clearinghouse Electronic Bulletin Board, the Ada Information Clearinghouse Newsletter, and the Association for Computing Machinery Ada Letters. The initial response rate was 17 percent and the usable response rate was 15 percent. The research instrument consisted of 37 questions. Each question was evaluated by an itemized rating scale or a semantic differential technique. The data analyses processes consisted of the following steps: examination of non-response bias, assessment of reliability and validity tests, demographic analysis, and multivariate analyses to test the three major hypotheses. Results showed that reusability is significantly related to the phase of the software development life cycle, reuse process, the level of layered architecture, the existence of an incentive system, reuse capability, software development effort, object-oriented design capability, repository development effort, Ada capability, and domain capability in an organization.