Supporting software reuse by the individual programmer

Abstract

Despite its long history and its benefits, software reuse has yet to become a common practise among software programmers. While there is much ongoing research, it focuses on large-scale organisation-level techniques and methodologies. There is very little research that considers reuse at the personal level as an important factor. The lack of focus and tool support has limited the potential for developers to reuse their past efforts. This paper introduces ICRT (Individual Code Reuse Tool), which provides support for an individual to efficiently reuse code fragments written in the past. ICRT uses the CBR methodology to manage the code fragments, and is integrated with the Eclipse IDE.