Integrating Reuse into the Rapid, Continuous Software Engineering Cycle through Test-Driven Search

Today's advanced agile practices such as Continuous Integration and Test-Driven Development support a wide range of software development activities to facilitate the rapid delivery of high-quality software. However, the reuse of pre-existing, third-party software components is not one of them. Software reuse is still primarily perceived as a time-consuming, unsystematic and ultimately, discontinuous activity even though it aims to deliver the same basic benefits as continuous software engineering - namely, a reduction in the time and effort taken to deliver quality software. However, the increasingly central role of testing in continuous software engineering offers a way of addressing this problem by exploiting the new generation of test-driven search engines that can harvest components based on tests. This search technology not only exploits artifacts that have already been created as part of the continuous testing process to harvest components, it returns results that have a high likelihood of being fit for purpose and thus of being worth reusing. In this paper, we propose to augment continuous software engineering with the rapid, continuous reuse of software code units by integrating the test-driven mining of software artifact repositories into the continuous integration process. More specifically, we propose to use tests written as part of the Test-First Development approach to perform test-driven searches for matching functionality while developers are working on their normal development activities. We discuss the idea of rapid, continuous code reuse based on recent advances in our test-driven search platform and elaborate on scenarios for its application in the future.