The economic impact of software reuse on maintenance
Stephen R. Schach · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1994
Abstract Software reuse has traditionally been put forward as a mechanism for reducing the cost of developing a product. This paper shows that the overall economic impact of reuse on maintenance is greater than its impact on development. A specific reuse example is worked in detail to illustrate the impact of reuse on the various types of maintenance that are performed on a software product. On average, the cost savings during maintenance as a consequence of reuse are nearly twice the corresponding savings during development. The results are generalized to show that, for an arbitrary product, the cost savings during maintenance as a consequence of software reuse exceed the cost savings during development as a consequence of reuse when more than about 51% of the software budget is devoted to maintenance, and increase rapidly as the proportion of the budget devoted to maintenance becomes large.