What key factors should be considered when considering the most appropriate type of reuse?

What key factors should be considered when considering the most appropriate type of reuse?

Ans: Key factors that you should consider when planning reuse are:

1. The development schedule for the software: If the software has to be developed quickly, you should try to reuse off-the-shelf systems rather than individual components. These are large-grain reusable assets. Although the fit to requirements may be imperfect, this approach minimizes the amount of development required.

2. The expected software lifetime: If you are developing a long-lifetime system, you should focus on the maintainability of the system. You should not just think about the immediate benefits of reuse but also of the long-term implications. Over its lifetime, you will have to adapt the system to new requirements, which will mean making changes to parts of the system. If you do not have access to the source code, you may prefer to avoid off-the-shelf components and systems from external suppliers; suppliers may not be able to continue support for the reused software.

3. The background, skills, and experience of the development team: All reuse technologies are fairly complex and you need quite a lot of time to understand and use them effectively. Therefore, if the development team has skills in a particular area, this is probably where you should focus.

4. The criticality of the software and its non-functional requirements: For a critical system that has to be certified by an external regulator, you may have to create a dependability case for the system. This is difficult if you don’t have access to the source code of the software. If your software has stringent performance requirements, it may be impossible to use strategies such as generator-based reuse, where you generate the code from a reusable domain specific representation of a system. These systems often generate relatively inefficient code.

5. The application domain: In some application domains, such as manufacturing and medical information systems, there are several generic products that may be reused by configuring them to a local situation. If you are working in such a domain, you should always consider these as an option.

6. The platform on which the system will run: Some components models, such as .NET, are specific to Microsoft platforms. Similarly, generic application systems may be platform-specific and you may only be able to reuse these if your system is designed for the same platform.