Software Component Reuse Library with Metadata based Search Mechanism

Abstract

Software reuse is the use of existing software components to build a new software system. Effective storage and retrieval of software components is much essential in software components reuse process. The researchers have developed a number of software components reuse techniques for storage and retrieval of software components. No one technique is complete in its own; every technique has its own merits and demerits. This paper presents a new approach for building software components reuse library based on metadata and MDL file searching for storage and fast retrieval of software components. Metadata are matched with given query, character by character so that a fraction of match can also be given due weight age. If we search the repository on the basis of attributes of metadata file, the search result would be better and thus giving higher precision and recall. The class diagram MDL file format contains valuable information about the structural description and contents of a class, i.e. class name, attributes, behavior, relationships, generalization etc. If we search the repository on the basis of attributes of MDL file descriptions, the search result would be better and thus giving higher precision, as compared to keyword based search. Moreover if we assign some numeric weights to different contents of a class, and arrange the search results in descending order, we would be able to find out the precision of the components in descending order of percentage match. The overall precision and recall of software component retrieval of the proposed system are 95% and 98%. Thus, this approach is suitable for automated real time software component retrieval tool. Hence the role of user to find the best-fit component from the search results would be much easier, efficient and reliable.