A new methodology for component reuse and maintenance

Component reuse and maintenance requires the development and utilization of specialized tools. In order to be correctly used, any software component needs to be properly understood, engineered and catalogued. Different information about components have to be organized, developed and retrieved during the process. The article discusses a methodology based on information retrieval techniques for automating the cataloguing of existing software components. We describe with an experiment the utilization of the system with prototype examples of reuse and maintenance and finally we evaluate the results of the experimental phase