Lowering the Barrier to Reuse through Test-Driven Search
This addresses the challenge for developers in reusing software components by reducing evaluation effort, but it is incremental as it builds on existing search engines.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating and testing software components found through search engines, which remains a barrier to reuse, and proposes that search engines need to be integrated into user-friendly environments to improve the risk-cost-benefit tradeoff.
Dedicated software search engines that index open source software repositories or in-house software assets significantly enhance the chance of finding software components suitable for reuse. However, they still leave the work of evaluating and testing components to the developer. To significantly change the risk-cost-benefit tradeoff involved in software reuse, search engines need to be supported by user friendly environments that deliver code search functionality non-intrusively right to developers' fingertips.