An empirical study of software reuse by experts in object-oriented design

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how expert object-oriented designers reuse software, examining their processes, mental activities, and representations to inform better reuse support environments.

Contribution

It provides detailed insights into expert reuse behaviors, mental processes, and representations, advancing understanding of software reuse in object-oriented design.

Findings

Design processes interact with reuse activities.

Mental retrieval often uses example-based methods.

Dynamic and static mental representations are both involved.

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of the software reuse activity by expert designers in the context of object-oriented design. Our study focuses on the three following aspects of reuse : (1) the interaction between some design processes, e.g. constructing a problem representation, searching for and evaluating solutions, and reuse processes, i.e. retrieving and using previous solutions, (2) the mental processes involved in reuse, e.g. example-based retrieval or bottom-up versus top-down expanding of the solution, and (3) the mental representations constructed throughout the reuse activity, e.g. dynamic versus static representations. Some implications of these results for the specification of software reuse support environments are discussed.