Monday, March 31, 2008

How big should a reusable component be?

Bill Frakes in his website asked to Ted Biggerstaff one of the pioneers in software reuse and specialist in the software generators area, how big should be a reusable component.

What do you thing about it?

2 comments:

Yguaratã C. Cavalcanti said...

It should be big enough to do what it was intended to do. Not bigger and not too short than that. :P

In my point of view, this question involves to much things. Programming language, for example, to be practical. Or the capacity of developers to write compact algorithms, to be subjective.

In addition, how do you define a component? It must be self contained? If so, it will be bigger then one not self contained.

Vinicius Garcia said...

Hum.. this is a difficult question. I think that the size of the component is not the main feature or should be the main question. The size is relative... size in LOC, size in KB/MB, size in set of elements?

I agree with Yguaratã, and I believe that others questions are: what is needed to be reusable component? which metrics can help in answer this question?