Reuse is an established software development practice, whose benefits have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners. In order for software reuse to advance from an opportunistic activity to a well-defined, systematic state of practice, the reuse phenomenon should be empirically studied in a real-world environment. To this end, OSS projects consist a fitting context for this purpose. In this paper, we aim at assessing the: (a) strategy and intensity of reuse activities in OSS

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... lopment, (b)effect of reuse activities on design quality, (c) modification of reuse decisions from a chronological viewpoint and (d) effect of these modifications on software design quality. In order to achieve these goals, we performed a large-scale embedded multi-case study on 1,111 Java projects, extracted from Google Code repository. The results of the case study provide a valuable insight on reuse processes in OSS development, that can be exploited by both researchers and practitioners.