Self-organizing Maps and Software Reuse

Software reuse is the process of building new systems from existing components instead of developing these systems from scratch. For a long time now software reuse is repeatedly acknowledged for playing an essential role in overcoming the so-called software crisis, i.e. the late delivery of then still faulty software products. Current development practice as for example object-oriented analysis, design, and programming should in principle assist the proliferation of the reuse idea. However, before existing components may be considered for reuse they have to be found in a software library. As ever in any area relying on the retrieval of particular objects from a large data store, the process of retrieval may turn out to be rather cumbersome, especially when a large number of objects is contained in the data store and the success of the whole operation is dependent on the retrieval of a small number of relevant objects. With this work we address the assistance of such a retrieval process by means of using a connectionist representation of the contents of the software library. More precisely, we rely on the self-organizing map for software library organization. What makes this model especially attractive for an information retrieval task such as software library organization is the topology preserving learning process leading to a highly intuitive similarity visualization.