Ranking Software Components for Pragmatic Reuse

Pragmatic software reuse, in which existing software components are invasively adapted for use in new projects, involves three main activities - selection, adaptation and integration. Most of the academic research into pragmatic research to date has focused on the second of these activities, adaptation, especially the definition of reuse plans and verification of invasive changes, even though the selection activity is arguably the most important and effort-intensive of the three activities. There is therefore a great deal of scope for improving the level of support provided by software search engines and recommendation tools to pragmatic reusers of software components. Test-driven search engines are particularly promising in this regard since they possess the inherent ability to “evaluate” components from the perspective of users' reuse scenarios. In this paper we discuss some of the main issues involved in improving the selection support for pragmatic reuse provided by test-driven search engines, describe some new metrics that can help address these issues, and present the outline of an approach for ranking software components in search results.