Component Reuse vs. Snippet Remixing

Reviewed by Jorge Aranda / 2012-04-10
Keywords: Reuse

Philip2012 Kavita Philip, Medha Umarji, Megha Agarwala, Susan Elliott Sim, Rosalva Gallardo-Valencia, Cristina V. Lopes, and Sukanya Ratanotayanon: "Software reuse through methodical component reuse and amethodical snippet remixing". Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW '12, 10.1145/2145204.2145407.

Every method for developing software is a prescriptive model. Applying a deconstructionist analysis to methods reveals that there are two texts, or sets of assumptions and ideals: a set that is privileged by the method and a second set that is left out, or marginalized by the method. We apply this analytical lens to software reuse, a technique in software development that seeks to expedite one's own project by using programming artifacts created by others. By analyzing the methods prescribed by Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE), we arrive at two texts: Methodical CBSE and Amethodical Remixing. Empirical data from four studies on code search on the web draws attention to four key points of tension: status of component boundaries; provenance of source code; planning and process; and evaluation criteria for candidate code. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of this work for the limits of methods, structure of organizations that reuse software, and the design of search engines for source code.

One of the ways in which the Internet transformed software development is the prevalence of the "programming by Google" practice: searching online for a function or snippet that does what you want, and copy-and-pasting it into one's own code, stitching it as needed to make it work. This practice is great in some ways (it speeds up development, it helps cross-pollinate ideas and techniques), but it also has its problems (maintaining code provenance, intellectual property, and diverging from policy, for example).

In this paper, Sim et al provide a very good exploration of the distinction between the safer, more planned, and stuffier "component reuse" approach and the ad-hoc, versatile, under-the-table "snippet remixing" approach to code reuse. They have some interesting statistics on the use of both approaches (for instance: 92% of surveyed developers admit to remixing snippets of code), and they identify points of tension between them. Their paper should be a wake-up call for Software Engineering professors to stop acting as if component-based reuse was all there is to code reuse, and an invitation to practitioners to consider the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and to define the right balance between them in their own contexts.

(Disclosure: Susan Sim is my academic sister—we had the same graduate advisor, though we did not overlap. Also, here is one more reminder that we link to PDFs of the papers we discuss when we find them. In cases we do not, asking the authors nicely for a copy usually works.)

Update, April 30: There is now a freely available electronic copy here.