LASER: a lexical approach to analogy in software reuse

Software reuse is the process of creating a software system from existing software components, rather than creating it from scratch. With the increase in size and complexity of existing software repositories, the need to provide intelligent support to the programmer becomes more pressing. An analogy is a comparison of certain similarities between things which are otherwise unlike. This concept has shown to be valuable in developing UML-level reuse techniques. In the LASER project we apply lexically-driven Analogy at the code level, rather than at the UML-level, in order to retrieve matching components from a repository of existing components. Using the lexical ontology Word-Net, we have conducted a case study to assess if class and method names in open source applications are used in a semantically meaningful way. Our results demonstrate that both hierarchical reuse and parallel reuse can be enhanced through the use of lexically-driven Analogy.