Understanding and evaluating software reuse costs and benefits from industrial cases—A systematic literature review

Context: Software reuse costs and benefits have been investigated in several primary studies, which have been aggregated in multiple secondary studies as well. However, existing secondary studies on software reuse have not critically appraised the evidence in primary studies. Moreover, there has been relatively less focus on how software reuse costs and benefits were measured in the primary studies, and the aggregated evidence focuses more on software reuse benefits than reuse costs. Objective: This study aims to cover the gaps mentioned in the context above by synthesizing and critically appraising the evidence reported on software reuse costs and benefits from industrial cases. Method: We used a systematic literature review (SLR) to conduct this study. The results of this SLR are based on a final set of 30 primary studies. Results: We identified nine software reuse benefits and six software reuse costs, in which better quality and improved productivity were investigated the most. The primary studies mostly used defect-based and development time-based metrics to measure reuse benefits and costs. Regarding the reuse practices, the results show that software product lines, verbatim reuse, and systematic reuse were the top investigated ones, contributing to more reuse benefits. The quality assessment of the primary studies showed that most of them are either of low (20%) or moderate (67%) quality. Conclusion: Based on the number and quality of the studies, we conclude that the strength of evidence for better quality and improved productivity as reuse benefits is high. There is a need to conduct more high quality studies to investigate, not only other reuse costs and benefits, but also how relatively new reuse-related practices, such as InnerSource and microservices architecture, impact software reuse.