Department of Software Technology
Vienna University of Technology
Self-Organizing Maps and Software Reuse
Software reuse is the process of building new systems from
existing components instead of developing these systems from
scratch.
For a long time now software reuse is repeatedly acknowledged
for playing an essential role in overcoming the so-called
software crisis, i.e. the late delivery of then still faulty
software products.
Current development practice as for example object-oriented
analysis, design, and programming should in principle assist
the proliferation of the reuse idea.
However, before existing components may be considered for reuse
they have to be found in a software library.
As ever in any area relying on the retrieval of particular
objects from a large data store, the process of retrieval may turn
out to be rather cumbersome, especially when a large number of
objects is contained in the data store and the success of the whole
operation is dependent on the retrieval of a small number
of relevant objects.
With this work we address the assistance of such a retrieval
process by means of using a connectionist representation of
the contents of the software library.
More precisely, we rely on the self-organizing map for software
library organization.
What makes this model especially attractive for an information
retrieval task such as software library organization is the
topology preserving learning process leading to a highly
intuitive similarity visualization.
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Comments: rauber@ifs.tuwien.ac.at