The Cost of Standardizing Components for Software Reuse

Software reuse can be an important step towards increasing productivity and quality. A necessary condition for its success is standardization of reusable components at each level of the software lifecycle. Standardization can be looked at in two different ways: externally (the interface), and internally (functionality). Both of these are fundamental, and imply extra costs in the development of components. The external perspective is the usual one—it considers the appearance of the components and the ways they are related to the rest of the world. The internal perspective is strongly related to reuse: here a component is considered standard when its functionality is common among all systems belonging to a particular domain; such components are usually discovered following domain analysis. A qualitative analysis of these two approaches to standards and reuse led us to a simple model showing the extra costs of standardizing reusable software components