Software Reuse Donor Cards

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of designing the equivalent of an organ donor card for software reuse artifacts. Organ donor cards have helped spur the implementation of a national organ transplantation distribution system. Large scale reuse efforts have government or corporate support for the tools and personnel necessary to run a program for reuse-in-the-Iarge, but support for reuse-in-thesmall is generally lacking. A simple docwnent, similar to an organ donor card, included with source code (e.g., when distributed over the Internet) would ease reuse for developers not involved with large, well-financed projects. The design of a software reuse card is proposed using a metadata form at. The design includes the equivalent functionality of an organ donor card as well as data specific to software reuse concerns. The proposed reuse donor card was tested using a variety of software artifacts ranging from abstract design patterns to source code fragments and functions. The card is designed to support automation in both generation and retrieval while being simple enough so as to not discourage its use. The donor card was evaluated by a number of professional programmers.