Achieving a reuse perspective within a component recovery process: an industrial scale case study

Abstract

Identifying elements of existing software that are reused within a system may provide maintainers with valuable insights during system evolution. This paper evaluates an extension of software reconnaissance that can be used to analyze reuse across features in a system, as part of a component recovery process. We illustrate and evaluate retrieval of reuse information in this fashion using a large, commercial ERP and warehousing application. Results suggest that the approach scales well in terms of reuse information across features in existing software, providing maintainers with a valuable new perspective on the software system in question.