An Empirical Study on the Reuse of Third-Party Libraries in Open-Source Software Development

Software development based on third-party libraries is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Nowadays, the plethora of open-source libraries that are freely available to developers, offer great reuse opportunities, with relatively low cost. However, the reuse process is in many cases rather ad-hoc. In this paper, we investigate reuse processes in five successful open-source projects, with respect to: (a) the extent to which software functionality is built from scratch or reused, (b) the frequency with which reuse decisions are modified, and (c) the effect of reuse on software product quality. The results of the study suggest that: (a) OSS projects heavily reuse third-party libraries, (b) reuse decisions are not frequently revisited, and (c) there is no clear evidence that reuse decisions are quality-driven.