A case-based support system to facilitate software reuse

This research proposes a case-based support system, the Designer´s Associate, for facilitating software reuse. Two factors motivate this research. First, reuse promises to improve software quality and designer productivity. Second, achieving effective software reuse continues to be inordinately difficult. The Designer´s Associate promotes software reuse by making design artifacts from previous development efforts both readily accessible and reusable. It provides tools to create, retrieve, reuse, adapt, and archive artifacts central to the software design process. An implementation of the Designer´s Associate was constructed to demonstrate the concept and assess its merits