Reusability of open source software across domains: A case study

Exploiting the enormous amount of open source software (OSS) as a vehicle for reuse is a promising opportunity for software engineers. However, this task is far from trivial, since such projects are sometimes not easy to understand and adapt to target systems, whereas at the same time the reusable assets are not obvious to identify. In this study, we assess open source software projects, with respect to their reusability, i.e., the easiness to adapt them in a new system. By taking into account that domain-specific reuse is more beneficial than domain-agnostic; we focus this study on identifying the application domains that contain the most reusable software projects. To achieve this goal, we compared the reusability of approximately 600 OSS projects from ten application domains through a case study. The results of the study suggested that in every aspect of reusability, there are different dominant application domains. However, Science and Engineering Applications and Software Development Tools, have proven to be the ones that are the most reuse-friendly. Based on this observation, we suggest software engineers, who are focusing on the specific application domains, to consider reusing assets from open source software projects.