Reuse News Brief - 96-04-26.txt [1/1]

Reuse News Brief - 96-04-26.txt [1/1]

[ReuseIC]

Reuse News Brief
Week Ending: April 26, 1996

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GENERALIZATION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED COMPONENTS FOR REUSE
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The May 1996 issue of Journal of Object-Oriented Programming 
includes a paper entitled, "Generalization of object-
oriented components for reuse: Measurements of effort and 
size change." The authors applied a number of metrics, 
including the new S/C metric, to test a number of 
statistical research hypothesis related to:
1. the correlation between different traditional metrics for 
O-O programs,
2. software development and generalization effort, and
3. the change in size of classes as a result of 
generalization.

The results indicate that:
1. the new S/C measure is different from the measures lines 
of code, tokens, statement counts, and cyclomatic 
complexity;
2. on average, the cost of generalization is 55% that of the 
original development; and
3. there are two opposing forces that affect the size upon 
generalization: completion of abstractions, which tends 
to increase size, and developing inheritance structures, 
which generally decreases class size.

SOURCE:
"Generalization of object-oriented components for reuse: 
	Measurements of effort and size change," Journal of 
	Object-Oriented Programming. May 1996 (Vol. 9, No. 2): 
	19-31.

Paper by:
Y. Pant, McDonald Dettwiler, North Sydney.

Brian Henderson, School of Computing Sciences, University of 
Technology, Sydney, Broadway, NSW, Australia: e-mail: 
brian@socs.uts.edu.au

J.M. Verner, Department of Information Systems, City 
University of Hong Kong Kowloon, Hong Kong

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ARC NEWS DISCUSSES REUSE WITH ANTHONY M. VALLETTA
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In the April 1996 issue of ARC News, Anthony M. Valletta, 
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, 
Communications and Intelligence (Acquisition)(C3I), 
discussed the institutionalizing of reuse into DoD software 
development practices. 

Valletta discussed C3I's belief that leveraging software 
reuse will extend the resources available to build DoD 
systems. "Software reuse gives us the opportunity to 
capitalize on our software investments; and planning for 
reuse, as part of our design and development process, will 
grow the number of reusable assets considerably," Valletta 
said. 

Valletta sees the need to promote the value of reuse as a 
major point of interest. He noted, "We have to show how 
large the Return on Investment (ROI) is, how we can increase 
our productivity, add to our efficiency, reduce the 
development lead times, get changes in the field faster, and 
finally, reduce the software operating and maintenance 
costs."

Valletta also discussed education, the need address the 
contracts' area to emphasize interpreting software metrics, 
and the need to encourage industry to produce good software 
products as future priorities necessary to revitalize the 
DoD software reuse program.

SOURCE:
"Reuse Q and A from the top," ARC (Army Reuse Center) News. 
	April 1996 (Vol.4, No.6): 1, 5-9.

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