Classification of object-oriented components for reuse

Abstract

There is a common agreement that increased successful reuse will lead to higher quality software at a lower cost. Object-oriented development techniques have advantages like limited semantic gap between design and implementation, encapsulation, and inheritance which all promote reuse. To achieve reuse in an object-oriented context the components have to be classified and ordered for retrieval at reuse time. This article discusses work done within the ESPRIT project REBOOT to make a scheme to identify and classify components for reuse. Keywords: Reuse, facets, term spaces, object-oriented 1 Introduction There has been a lot of discussion about the software crisis [Dij72, Wul77], which was identified in the late sixties. The software crisis is a phrase that denotes the lack of productivity in the software area, the software suppliers are not able to satisfy the needs of their customers. This crisis is of huge importance, not only economically, but also socially and politically. Differen...