REACT - A Process for Improving Open-Source Software Reuse

Software reuse is a popular practice, which is constantly gaining ground among practitioners. The main reason for this is the potential that it provides for reducing development effort and increasing the end-product quality. At the same time, Open-Source Software (OSS) repositories are nowadays flourishing and can facilitate the reuse process, through the provision of a variety of software artifacts. However, up-to-date OSS reuse processes have mostly been opportunistic, leading to not fully capitalizing existing reuse potentials. In this study we propose a process (namely REACT) for improving planned OSS reuse practices, i.e., we define the activities that a software engineer can perform to reuse OSS artifacts. To illustrate the applicability of REACT, we provide an example, in which a mobile application is developed based upon the reuse of OSS artifacts. To validate the proposed process we compared the effort required to develop the application with and without adapting REACT process. Our preliminary results suggest that REACT may reduce up to 50% the effort required to build an application from scratch.