Recommendation-based component selection for component-based systems

Abstract

Selection of reusable software components in software repositories to facilitate quality software development has always been a focal point and a big concern for software researchers. One of the most time-consuming tasks in software reusability is tracing and retrieving software components from a large repository. The selection of inapt software package can result in high cost and ultimately becomes a prime source of adverse outcome in business processes and performance of the organization. Creation of quality software depends upon the selection of the best set of components among all the alternatives present in the reusable component repository. Frequently used sets of components can be obtained by using mining algorithms. This paper proposes a component selection methodology and a method for retrieval of the optimal set of reusable components from the repository. Case-based retrieval is applied for initial filtering of components to narrow down the search space. A data mining algorithm is applied to extract the candidate set of components for a given case. Most frequent set of components aid the decision-maker to select the finest component set and also assist in suggesting the supplementary components for the case to match with the latest updates.