An Ecological View on Software Reuse

The increase of consumption is an important motivation for the reuse of either physical or virtual products. As the software market has risen, software reuse has become a practice with favourable effects for software development companies and their clients. The most important benefits are increased productivity, reduced costs, better and easier maintenance, decreased development lead times and the improved quality of software products. Successful reuse depends on several technical and non-technical factors. The ecological impact of software is an important non-technical factor of software reuse that needs to be analysed in the context of the rapid evolution of optimization techniques. The main goal of this study is to identify ecological perspectives on software reuse. These will complete the framework of software reuse together with other technical factors, such as compatibility, and non-technical factors, such as economic and ethical implications.