An empirical analysis of the costs of clone- and platform-oriented software reuse

Software reuse lowers development costs and improves the quality of software systems. Two strategies are common: clone & own (copying and adapting a system) and platform-oriented reuse (building a configurable platform). The former is readily available, flexible, and initially cheap, but does not scale with the frequency of reuse, imposing high maintenance costs. The latter scales, but imposes high upfront investments for building the platform, and reduces flexibility. As such, each strategy has distinctive advantages and disadvantages, imposing different development activities and software architectures. Deciding for one strategy is a core decision with long-term impact on an organization’s software development. Unfortunately, the strategies’ costs are not well-understood - not surprisingly, given the lack of systematically elicited empirical data, which is difficult to collect. We present an empirical study of the development activities, costs, cost factors, and benefits associated with either reuse strategy. For this purpose, we combine quantitative and qualitative data that we triangulated from 26 interviews at a large organization and a systematic literature review covering 57 publications. Our study both confirms and refutes common hypotheses on software reuse. For instance, we confirm that developing for platform-oriented reuse is more expensive, but simultaneously reduces reuse costs; and that platform-orientation results in higher code quality compared to clone & own. Surprisingly, refuting common hypotheses, we find that change propagation can be more expensive in a platform, that platforms can facilitate the advancement into innovative markets, and that there is no strict distinction of clone & own and platform-oriented reuse in practice.