Coupling patterns in the effective reuse of open source software

Abstract

Albeit practical reuse approaches have been established in commercial environments, the Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of the reuse mechanism. Many OSS projects, sharing the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code. In order to fill these gaps, this study focuses on source code folders of OSS projects: the objective is to investigate their potential as shareable and small-grained reusable software components in other OSS projects. © 2007 IEEE.