Methodology for Building CBR Applications

As the previous chapters of this book have shown, case-based reasoning is a technology that has been successfully applied to a large range of diierent tasks. Through all the diierent CBR projects, both basic research projects as well as industrial development projects, lots of knowledge and experience about how to build a CBR application has been collected. Today, there is already an increasing number of successful companies developing industrial CBR applications. In former days, these companies could develop their early pioneering CBR applications in an ad-hoc manner. The highly-skilled CBR expert of the company w as able to manage these projects and to provide the developers with the required expertise. Today, the situation has changed. The market for CBR has started to increase signiicantly. Therefore, these companies have to face the fact that the market demands companies executing more and larger CBR projects than in these early days. It is required that they develop software that fulllls current quality standards. Consequently, contemporary IT companies can no longer sustain ineecient or ineeectual CBR application development. What is required is a methodology for building CBR applications. Such a methodology should make CBR application development a systematic engineering activity rather than an art known by a few experts Shaw, 1990; Gibbs, 1994. A methodology usually combines a number of methods into a philosophy which addresses a number of phases of the software development life-cycle e.g. Booch, 1994, chapter 1. It should give guidelines recipes about the activities that need to be performed in order to successfully develop a certain kind of product, that is, in our case, a CBR application. The use of an appropriate methodology should provide signiicant quan-tiiable beneets in terms of productivity, e.g., reduce the risk of wasted eeorts, quality, e.g., inclusion of quality deliverables, communication, a reference for both formal and informal communication between members of the development team, and will provide a solid base for management decision making, e.g., planning, resource allocation, and monitoring.