Integrating GQM and Data Warehousing for the Definition of Software Reuse Metrics

Software reuse is the practice of using existing artifacts (code, architecture, requirements, etc.) in new projects. The advantages of using previously developed software in new projects are easily understood. However, reusing artifacts is usually done in an ad-hoc and incipient way, requiring an important effort of adaptation, so developers frequently prefer to develop components from scratch. In this paper we present a strategy that is being adopted by Critical Software, a medium-sized company, to promote software reuse. This strategy starts by assuming that the success of software reuse is dependent on the ability of measuring its advantages. We have thus proposed the use of the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) technique, extended with Data Warehousing data model design concepts to extract a set of reuse-specific metrics for measuring the gains of reuse. We show that it is very easy to measure the productivity improvement due to code reuse, by simply measuring or estimating the efforts of developing a component for reuse, integrating it a new artifact, and developing this artifact, built with reusing the component.