Software Reuse and Continuous Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Context: As software applications become more complex and competition between companies demands shorter time-to-market, the methodologies to develop these applications needs to adapt to this new environment of continuous change. New strategies are required to allow effective management of changing requirements, continuous deliveries, testing, integration, etc. Software reuse emerges as a potential solution to these demands. This work presents results from a systematic mapping study aimed at assessing the use of software reuse in the context of continuous software development. Objective: To identify, analyse, and classify the published works in order to provide an overview of current challenges and the trends in the application of systematic software reuse to the continuous software development. Method: We use a systematic mapping study, posing a set of questions to map the research space, defining exclusion/inclusion criteria and developing a classification schema. We limit our study to peer-reviewed works published up to December 2016. Results: Our study includes a set of fifteen works. We classified the works according to reuse processes, CSD activities and type of research. Component-based development is the most frequent reuse process, while the three CSD activities (Deployment, integration and testing) are mentioned equally. Quality, productivity and reduction of costs are the reuse effects more reported. Conclusions: We have not found previous systematic reviews in this field. The main outcome is that we do not find causal relations between reuse processes and CSD activities. The effect of reuse do not relate to the context of the experience reported. There is a lack of empirical evidence and reported data. This is a poorly investigated area offering a promising domain for future research.