ABSTRACT
Adopters of corporate software reuse programs face important decisions with respect to the size of components added to the reuse repository. Large components offer substantial savings when reused but limited opportunity for reuse; small components afford greater opportunity for reuse, but with less payoff. This suggests the possibility of an "optimal" component size, where the reuse benefit is at a maximum. In the software engineering discipline, this relationship - termed the Goldilocks Principle - has been empirically observed in software development, software testing, and software maintenance. This paper examines whether this relationship also applies for software reuse. In ...