Abstract
We demonstrate that measuring reuse in object-oriented systems is not as straight-forward as it might seem. On the basis of a small example application, we show that object-oriented reuse metrics tend to overestimate the “real” reuse in an application and that this problem can partly be overcome by carefully selecting an appropriate definition of the “size” attribute used in many proposed metrics. We also emphasize that it is necessary to distinguish between different flavors of “reuse” in order to achieve consistent measurements.
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Notes
Kennedy refines this kind of reuse and proposes the notions of reuse-by-instantiation and reuse-by-polymorphism (Kennedy 1992).
Of course, the boundary between predefined add-ons and those libraries which are regarded relevant for reuse considerations is somewhat blurred. In our opinion, packages shipped with the development system can be considered “intrinsic” if they are standardized and therefore as stable as the programming language itself. For non-standard libraries (as the one employed here), the possible instability must be traded off against the reuse benefits, even if the libraries are available at no extra costs.
As the code presented in the paper has been compacted in order to save space, the numbers refer to the original program files.
Note that our focus shifted a little bit towards the server perspective in parts of our discussion.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Hitz, M. (1996). Measuring Reuse Attributes In Object-Oriented Systems. In: Murphy, J., Stone, B. (eds) OOIS’ 95. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1009-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1009-5_2
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76010-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-1009-5
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