Defining Factors, Goals and Criteria for Reusable Component Evaluation

This paper presents an approach for defining evaluation criteria for reusable software components. We introduce a taxonomy of factors that influence selection, describe each of them, and present a hierarchical decomposition method for deriving reuse goals from factors and formulating the goals into an evaluation criteria hierarchy. We present some highlights from two case studies in which the approach was applied. The approach presented in this paper is a part of the Off-The-Shelf Option (OTSO) method that has been developed for reuseable component selection process.