User-perceived reusability estimation based on analysis of software repositories

Abstract

The popularity of open-source software repositories has led to a new reuse paradigm, where online resources can be thoroughly analyzed to identify reusable software components. Obviously, assessing the quality and specifically the reusability potential of source code residing in open software repositories poses a major challenge for the research community. Although several systems have been designed towards this direction, most of them do not focus on reusability. In this paper, we define and formulate a reusability score by employing information from GitHub stars and forks, which indicate the extent to which software components are adopted/accepted by developers. Our methodology involves applying and assessing different state-of-the-practice machine learning algorithms, in order to construct models for reusability estimation at both class and package levels. Preliminary evaluation of our methodology indicates that our approach can successfully assess reusability, as perceived by developers.