You work for a company in Northern Quarter, Manchester, e.g. Valtech that has a good experience (5-7 years) of building information systems for the healthcare sector.
Recently, they realized that many software development organizations believe that investing in software reuse would increase quality of software products and improve the productivity of the organization. The company is proposing to invest money, time, and resources into software reuse.
The company hopes to improve their competitive edge through increased quality in the software developed and decreased effort required in the software development process. Scenario The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has asked you to investigate the challenges of using software reuse techniques in practice by surveying the literature to come up with the best software reuse practices which if applied in your company would improve the competitive edge (i.e., the software quality and company productivity) of the company. While collecting your papers supporting your recommended best software reuse practices, the CIO advised you to focus on empirical studies of the software reuse.
Tasks Your tasks are to:
• Conduct information gathering in research publications (journals and conferences) accessed through the library, online, and the in module materials provided.
• Give an overview about software reuse and define what is software quality and software productivity.
· Identify the challenges (3-4 challenges) of software reuse development in practice.
· Critically analyse whether the use of software reuse techniques would improve the quality of software products and increase the productivity of the company.
· Based on your analysis above, develop a set of recommendations for adopting specific software reuse method(s). Support these recommendations with evidence.
Report Format
Your report should include the following:
Front Sheet – your full name, your student ID, your User name, date, the assessment title, the name of the module and its CRN.
• Executive Summary – summarise report objectives, findings and conclusions.
• Table of Contents.
• Introduction – motivation and aim for report and description of report structure.
Main body of the report
• Discussion and Recommendations
• Conclusions containing, lessons learned, and strengths and weakness of your report as a whole.
• References – sources used in your report (and cite them in the body of your report).
You must consistently use a recognised referencing style (e.g. APA style). It is advised to use recent and peer-reviewed resources. Your submission should be typed (rather than hand-written) in, font size 12pt.
If you use colour for emphasis, please bear in mind your submission may be printed in black and white.
Recommended Reading
There are useful reading resources in the module reading list.
• Cox, R. (2025). Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security: For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it’s very real. Queue, 23(1), 84-107
• Getov, V. (2010, July). Software development productivity: challenges and future trends. In 2010 IEEE 34th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (pp. 2-7). IEEE.
• Module lecture notes
• Moltu, J. L., Muge, P., & Yusuf, B. J. (2026). Modeling Transfer Learning for Efficient Code Reuse in Large-Scale Software Development. International Journal of Latest Technology in Engineering, Management & Applied Science, 15(1), 101-115
• Rine, D. C., & Nada, N. (2000). An empirical study of a software reuse reference model. Information and Software Technology, 42(1), 47-65.
• Software engineering – Sommerville, Ian, Pearson Education, 2015, 10th Edition, August 2015
• Talukder, A. T., Alam, O., & Azim, A. (2025, August). Leveraging LLMs for Automatic Feature Extraction in Embedded Systems to Support Software Reuse. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration and Data Science (IRI) (pp. 1-6). IEEE
