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1994 Technical Reports

Organizing Reusable Software Repositories Through Heuristic Clustering

Khuzaima S. Daudjee

Technical Report CS-94-10

York University

October 3, 1994

Abstract

As software reuse becomes more prominent and accepted in industry, systems and tools for software reuse become a key aspect in achieving successful reuse of software artifacts. A major problem with such tools is the classification and retrieval of the software components. In order to search for and retrieve the conceptually closest software component from a software repository, components need to be classified in some manner. We address this problem by proposing two heuristic clustering schemes to organize software repositories. We contend that our proposed schemes automatically organize repositories containing descriptions of software components, and that this organization easily supports a retrieval method for the software components to be reused. Our clustering schemes classify components that have been represented using a knowledge representation-based language, and eliminate the need for manual effort for classification when the repository's contents are changed. Our proposed methods are tested on a small, but realistic, software collection. The experiments indicate that while both methods attain satisfactory performance with respect to the number of retrieved components that are relevant, the second method presented in this thesis performs very satisfactorily in terms of the measure of relevant components retrieved, and the proportion of retrieved components that are relevant.

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