Suggest why the savings in cost from reusing existing software are not simply proportional to the size of the components that are reused.
What will be an ideal response?
If savings from reuse were proportional to the amount of code reused, then reusing
2000 lines of code would save twice as much as reusing 1000 lines of code.
However, to reuse 2000 lines of code, that code must be understood and the costs
of program understanding are not linear – the more code to be understood, the more
effort it takes to understand it. Furthermore, more changes may be required, the
larger the amount of code reused so this also adds to the costs of reusing more
code.
Of course, all this is only true if the code has to be understood before it is
reused. If it can be reused without change, then savings from reusing large chunks
of code tend to be proportionally greater than savings from reusing small code
fragments.
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