Towards an Empirical Reuse Approach for the Software Evolution: A Case Study

Software systems must evolve, or they risk losing market share to competitors. However, evolving such a system is extraordinarily difficult, complicated, and time consuming. In this case, how to reuse the existing features of the previous version and reduce the code redundancy is a really appealing problem. For example, in order to support EJB3.0, many application server vendors have to evolve their existing EJB2.x containers to comply with the new standards. However, the code redundancy between both of the container versions not only increases the development cost, but also increases the maintenance cost when the software are modified because of potential problems or new requirements. In this paper, we propose an empirical reuse approach for software evolution and demonstrate it in a real EJB container evolution project.