Design and development of a reusable software components repository

Abstract

Software reuse has great potential to improve the productivity and quality. Software reuse helps to produce quick prototypes with lower cost. We can envision the scenario of the near future where a software manager by using his mobile device can check the available software assets in the organization repository and accordingly plan the schedule and cost of the software product. However various constraints such as non-availability of rich quality reuse components repository, efficient classification and retrieval techniques add a new dimension to the technical challenges before this vision becomes reality. Thus component rich repositories and efficient classification and retrieval techniques are needed to make software reuse a routine practice. The work presented in this thesis is an effort to address these issues by proposing new and efficient classification and retrieval schemes for a reusable software repository. First part of the thesis proposes a flexible weighted approach that makes use of both formal as well as natural specifications to classify and retrieve the components from the repository. Weights are assigned to each type of specifications depending upon the software development phase in which user is working. In early phases of development, requirements are descriptive in nature, so user may assign higher weight to natural specifications. In later development phases, when requirements are in concrete form and formal view is available, more weight can be assigned to formal specifications for matching. Depending upon user requirements weights can be adjusted and appropriate component can be retrieved for given user context. We have been able to locate the component with even 100% match by assigning weight of 80% to formal and 20% to natural specifications. This has been observed if we further increase the percentage weight assigned to formal specifications then it will be able to locate only exact matches but it may miss all near matches.