Abstract During the last years the TD community is striving to offer methods and tools for reducing the amount of TD, but also understand the underlying concepts. One popular practice that still has not been investigated in the context of TD, is software reuse. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between white-box code reuse and TD principal and interest. In particular, we target at unveiling if the reuse of code can lead to software with better levels of TD. To achieve this goal, we performed a case study on approximately 400 OSS systems, comprised of 897 thousand classes, and compare the levels of TD for reused and natively-written classes. The results of the study suggest that reused code usually has less TD interest; however, the amount of principal in them is higher. A synthesized view of the aforementioned results suggest that software engineers shall opt to reuse code when necessary, since apart from the established reuse benefits (i.e., cost savings, increased productivity, etc.) are also getting benefits in terms of maintenance. Apart from understanding the phenomenon per se, the results of this study provide various implications to research and practice.

中文翻译：

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实践中的代码重用：受益或损害技术债务

摘要 在过去的几年中，TD 社区正在努力提供减少 TD 数量的方法和工具，同时也了解基本概念。一种尚未在 TD 上下文中进行研究的流行做法是软件重用。本文的目的是研究白盒代码重用与TD本息之间的关系。特别是，我们的目标是揭示代码的重用是否可以导致软件具有更好的 TD 水平。为了实现这一目标，我们对大约 400 个 OSS 系统（包含 89.7 万个类）进行了案例研究，并比较了重用类和本地编写的类的 TD 级别。研究结果表明，重用代码通常对 TD 的兴趣较小；但是，其中的本金金额更高。上述结果的综合视图表明，软件工程师应在必要时选择重用代码，因为除了既定的重用好处（即，成本节约、提高生产力等）之外，还可以从维护方面获得好处。除了对现象本身的理解之外，本研究的结果还为研究和实践提供了各种启示。