Social, Human and Organizational Factors for Component Reuse Adoption in Software Engineering

Abstract

Component reuse is the use of components (e.g. subsystems or single objects) of one application in another application, and individual informal reuse has been common since the first programs were written. However, organization-wide component reuse, also known as Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE), has yet to gain universal acceptance despite the benefits having been recognized since the late 1960s. The initial barriers to its implementation were related to technical incompatibility. Applications were specifically written for a particular computer’s hardware/operating system and its components did not run on other systems. Research focussed on solutions to technology-related barriers. By the 1990s, many of the technical issues had been addressed, but the take-up rate of CBSE remained low, prompting an increased research interest into non-technical issues. The research question in this study is “What are the non-technical barriers to the organisation-wide adoption of CBSE and how do these barriers manifest themselves?”. The key non-technical barriers were identified as social interaction, human and organizational systems issues, which formed the basis of the three research questions.