A Social Network-Based Method for Finding Reusable Software Assets

Software reuse is the concept of reducing the cost and efforts of developing new software by reusing existing software assets. Much research is being done on software reuse because of its importance and effectiveness. However, problems still exist. One of the biggest problems is the difficulty of finding useful software assets. More specifically, a developer usually does not know where to find, how to select, and how to reuse reusable assets. The main causes of these problems are the heterogeneity of asset repositories managed by different organizations, the limitations of existing asset-search methods, and insufficient descriptions of reusable assets. To solve these problems, we propose a social network-based method to more effectively search reusable software assets by using the social relationships among the developers. To enable developers to more easily locate reusable assets, three important aspects (similarity, familiarity, and favorability) of developers' social relationships and relevant factors are defined in the perspective of software reuse. In addition, the method of using reuse-related knowledge to supplement insufficient descriptions of assets is defined. A social network-based search model and metrics are developed based on the three aspects and eight factors. We have evaluated our approach by using the data collected from an open source domain.