Relevance feedback in the retrieval of reusable software components

We focus on the issue of retrieving software from a collection of reusable software components. The proposed method is a variation of the relevance feedback process, a popular retrieval mechanism typically used for text document environments. We describe how this method can be adapted for reusable software collections. Two variations of a relevance feedback process are presented. Also, experimental results of the methods' performance evaluation on two different software collections are presented and analyzed. The results show that both methods perform well, by attaining recall and precision values above 70% on the average. Specific drawbacks of the methods are also identified and discussed. Our proposal constitutes an attempt to put the software retrieval problem in the map of technical obstacles for software reuse. Unlike most related reports that treat software retrieval as a subissue of some other software reusability issue (such as classification), we believe that software retrieval is a self-standing issue. As such, we address the problem of software retrieval in a general framework, that is, without being attached to particular software classification and repository organization techniques.

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