Toward reuse of object-oriented software design models

Abstract In software reuse, which is an important approach to improving the practice of software engineering, many factors may hinder reusing software artifacts. Among those factors are the availability of software artifacts at a different level of abstraction and a method to classify and retrieve them. This paper proposes an approach based on faceted classification scheme for the classification and retrieval of software design artifacts, namely Object-Oriented Design Models, thus facilitating their reuse. Six facets, Domain, Abstractions, Responsibilities, Collaborations, Design View, and Asset Type have been defined to constitute the classification and the retrieval attributes. Each of the facets describes one aspect of an Object-Oriented design model. It contains a number of predefined terms chosen through the analysis of various software systems specifications. The selected terms of each facet are arranged on a conceptual graph to aid the retrieval process. A design artifact is classified by associating with it a software descriptor through the selection of one or more terms from each facet. The role of a descriptor is to emphasize the important structural and behavioral properties of a design artifact and also to document the artifacts associated with the design model. The associated similarity-based retrieval mechanism helps users to search for candidate design artifacts that best match their target specification. The similarity analysis is based on the estimation of the conceptual distance between the terms in a query descriptor and the terms in the specified descriptors of various design models in a software repository. A case study is presented to illustrate the classification and the retrieval process.