Reuse dimensions

Abstract

In recent years, there have been much publications on reuse. In order to bet an overview of the whole field and also a good impression of the state of the reuse art, we studied reuse literature of the last few years. As basis for comparison, we classified literature according to four (more or less orthogonal) dimensions, based on the actions and knowledge of the reuser, i.e. the software engineer. The dimensions are: actions to be taken to get an existing reusable item; knowledge to be applied to find an existing reusable item; actions to be taken to build the complete system needed; knowledge to be applied to get the complete system needed.