A component-extraction-based program reuse system

A program search system is indispensable for software reuse. However, conventional search techniques are inappropriate for prompt reuse of programs because these techniques target a program source code as a retrieval unit. In this paper, we propose a new component-extraction-based program search system. Our system analyzes a collection of object-oriented (OO) programs, and extracts reusable software components composed of interdependent OO classes. Using our system, the extracted components can be searched by keywords, and the result set can be viewed by a web browser such that the user can decide whether the query result component matches his/her requirements. As a result of evaluation experiments, it is found that our system can extract many reusable components, and support the user to search extracted components effectively.