TOWARDS A FORMAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOFTWARE REUSE

It is reasonable to expect that the use of formal methods in software reuse will help improve the practice of this discipline as well as enh ance our understanding of its products and processes. We have identifi ed the following technical activities that Cake place in software reus e as candidates for a formal modeling: representing reusable assets, r epresenting reuse queries, defining matching criteria, defining a stor age structure, deriving measures of distance and deriving a calculus o f program modification. In this paper we discuss how a simple mathemat ical model based on set theory and relation theory allows us to captur e these activities in a unified, coherent framework. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.