RETRIEVAL OF REUSABLE COMPONENTS USING FUNCTIONAL SIMILARITY

During application development under reuse, much effort is spent in re trieving suitable components. This paper presents an approach to retri eval based on software descriptions of components, and on a mechanism for computing the functional similarity of clusters of reuse candidate s. Descriptions are given in a semi-formal fashion and using fuzzy wei ghts for keywords. Algorithms for similarity computation are presented , The experimental tool for this approach manages imprecise queries po sed by developers against a software repository; results about reuse o f object-oriented code based on the use of the tool are presented, giv ing measures of recall and precision of the proposed approach.