Automating the detection of reusable parts in existing software

Presents a model based on an expert-system approach for the scavenging of reusable components from existing software systems. The authors also describe a toolset called Code Miner that implements part of the model. The toolset uses Prolog as its inference engine. Code Miner is designed to assist the programmer in finding reusable components in existing software written in C. To investigate the feasibility of the approach, an empirical study was conducted of the effectiveness of the toolset. In the study, public-domain software was scanned by the toolset for reusable parts and its output was examined by a team of human experts. The results of this experiment are outlined