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Master Thesis

Open Source Software Components Reuse Process

It is clear that Free Libre Open Source Software or FLOSS as it frequently appears in literature, has been surprisingly and continually increasing lately. As a result, lots of lines of code have been and are freely being made available, continuously. In many cases this open source code is carefully designed, implemented and tested for bugs and therefore reusable. Moreover, open source code has started to become very popular to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), which reuse it in order to achieve faster development along with reducing the testing time of system under development as possible. Source code forges such as SourceForge, Google Code, Koders, etc., which are open source software pools, make the search for open source code easy by providing mechanisms based on a number of fields such as programming language, licensing, etc.

This Master Thesis aims in a detailed recording of the open source software components’ which are available online reuse process. Initially, a review of the research area is being conducted. On one hand basic terminology is being defined. On the other hand, speculations that triggered the research are mentioned. A series of case studies follows in order for the efficiency of code reuse as a part of the general software development process to be justified. The aforementioned knowledge is being organized to a semi-automated process model for open source software reuse and a web platform that will implement the functionality of this model is being proposed, in terms of design. Finally, this work is being concluded with references to related work, conclusions and future work ideas.

This research endeavor led to a scientific publication entitled «A semi-automated process model for Open Source code reuse» which was presented to the 5th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches in Software Engineering (ENASE ’10), 24-25 July 2010, Athens, Greece.