  One of the purported ways to increase productivity and reduce development
time is to reuse existing features and modules. If reuse is adopted, logically
then, it will have a direct impact on a system's evolution. However, the
evidence in the literature is not clear on the extent to which reuse is
practiced in real-world projects, nor how it is practiced. In this paper we
report the results of an investigation of reuse and evolution of software
features in one of the largest open-source ecosystems - Eclipse. Eclipse
provides a leading example of how a system can grow dramatically in size and
number of features while maintaining its quality. Our results demonstrate the
extent of feature reuse and evolution and also patterns of reuse across ten
different Eclipse releases (from Europa to Neon).
