Supporting the construction and evolution of component repositories

Repositories must be designed to meet the evolving and dynamic needs of software development organizations. Current software repository methods rely heavily on classification, which exacerbates acquisition and evolution problems by requiring costly classification and domain analysis efforts before a repository can be used effectively. This paper outlines an approach in which minimal initial structure is used to effectively find relevant software components while methods are employed to incrementally improve repository structures. The approach is demonstrated through PEEL, a tool to semi-automatically identify reusable components, and CodeFinder, a retrieval system that compensates for the lack of explicit knowledge structures through spreading activation retrieval and allows component representations to be incrementally improved while users are searching for information. The combination of these techniques yields a flexible software repository that minimizes up-front costs and improves its retrieval effectiveness as developers use it to find reusable software artifacts.