Analysing the Return of Investment of Reuse

Software reuse can be very useful in increasing the productivity and the quality level of a company, but the costs of this kind of investment are not always covered by the advantages it brings. It is particularly important to be able to correctly analyze the cost implied by software reuse in order to decide whether to adopt it or not. Even when a reuse policy has been adopted, reuse is not always the right solution and there are situations in which it is more convenient to develop a component from scratch. It is difficult to obtain a mathematical model for the evaluation of the effort required by the adaptation of a component in a new context. A different approach is proposed where the estimation is made using the knowledge and the experience gained from previous cases and stored in an ad-hoc base.