Extracting Components from Open Source: The Component Adaptation Environment (COPE) Approach

Open Source Software (OSS) represents an extremely valuable resource that is reused systematically almost in every software project. The reuse of OSS components however is restricted to ready-made components and developers who want to reuse code that exists in OSS projects but is not offered as a black-box component often resort to copying existing code and adapting it in their projects. OPEN-SME is a European research project which aims at providing ready-to-use OSS components that originate from existing OSS projects but are not necessarily provided as such. In this work we describe the Component Adaptation Environment (COPE) tool that was developed in the context of the OPEN-SME project and enables software experts, called reuse engineers, to extract components from OSS projects, test them and provide test documentation, validate them with Model-Based Testing techniques, package them and upload them in a component repository for reuse. The whole approach aims at creating an ever increasing repository of trustworthy reusable software components from different application domains.