Supporting reuse by delivering task-relevant and personalized information

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 513 - 523
• Main Authors: Ye, Yunwen, Fischer, Gerhard
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 2002
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Designing software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Designing software > Software implementation planning > Software design techniques; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management > Software development methods; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development techniques > Reusability; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Software libraries and repositories; Software engineering; Delivery system; Cognitive theory; Software architecture; Software development; Database query; Information system; Information delivery; Software reusability
• ISBN: 158113472X; 9781581134728
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/581339.581402

Technical, cognitive, and social factors inhibit the widespread success of systematic software reuse. Our research is primarily concerned with the cognitive and social challenges faced by software developers: how to motivate them to reuse and how to reduce the difficulty of locating components from a large reuse repository. Our research has explored a new interaction style between software developers and reuse repository systems enabled by information delivery mechanisms. Instead of passively waiting for software developers to explore the reuse repository with explicit queries, information delivery autonomously locates and presents components by using the developers' partially written programs as implicit queries.We have designed, implemented, and evaluated a system called CodeBroker, which illustrates different techniques to address the essential challenges in information delivery: to make the delivered information relevant to the task-at-hand and personalized to the background knowledge of an individual developer. Empirical evaluations of CodeBroker show that information delivery is effective in promoting reuse.