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Session: Components and languages

Migrating to reuse: the DesignMatcher approach

P. Hornsby, I. Newman -- Loughborough University, UK

Reuse can provide major long-term benefits for software development within an organisation, in terms of cost savings and reliability. However, these savings can only be achieved if the organisation is able to devote sufficient resources to establishing and (re)using a source of components.

This paper describes an approach to establishing a source of reusable components and retrieving them during development, which has been designed to promote reuse while minimising the degree of change required by the host organisation. In order to obtain the benefits, the DesignMatcher approach is based on the principle that the developers understanding of the problem and possible solutions evolve during the design and development process. DesignMatcher works y making it easy to add design and code fragments and by offering unobtrusive suggestions for possible matching components as the developer works on the system.'