An Empirical Study of Software Reuse in Reconstructive Maintenance

Software reuse has mainly been studied in software development. However, software reuse is also an important aspect in software maintenance. Reconstructive maintenance involves disassembling an old system into components and reassembling them into a new one. This paper discusses software reuse in reconstructive maintenance. An empirical study in an industrial software development environment is presented, involving a legacy system. In particular, the study has found that the cyclomatic complexity metric at some levels may be related to a function's reusability. The study also found that there seems to be a high correlation between the cyclomatic complexity metric of a function and the lines of code metric of the function. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Software Maintenance 9: 69–83, 1997.