On opportunistic software reuse

Abstract

The availability of open source assets for almost all imaginable domains has led the software industry to opportunistic design—an approach in which people develop new software systems in an ad hoc fashion by reusing and combining components that were not designed to be used together. In this paper we investigate this emerging approach. We demonstrate the approach with an industrial example in which Node.js modules and various subsystems are used in an opportunistic way. Furthermore, to study opportunistic reuse as a phenomenon, we present the results of three contextual interviews and a survey with reuse practitioners to understand to what extent opportunistic reuse offers improvements over traditional systematic reuse approaches.