Software Reusability: Present and Potential

Software reuse is the use of existing software or software knowledge to construct new software. Reusable assets can be either reusable software or software knowledge. Reusability is a property of a software asset that indicates its probability of reuse. Software reuse's purpose is to improve software quality and productivity. Reusability is one of the major software quality factors. Software reuse is of interest because people want to build systems that are bigger and more complex, more reliable, less expensive and that are delivered on time. They have found traditional software engineering methods inadequate, and feel that software reuse can provide a better way of doing software engineering. In this paper, we are giving the general aspect of software reusability and it's potential. We are also giving a broader view of reuse and some of the so far less considered areas of this. The critical importance of interactions among the reuse and related communities with in software engineering, such as the object oriented and the software maintenance communities have been also discussed.