Analogical Reuse of Object-Oriented Analysis Models

Software reuse involves using again software artifacts that have been successfully built before.To be successful with software reuse, techniques for reuse must be integrated into both theinformation system development process and the programming environment. If potential reusecan be identified early in an information system development process, the gain in developmenttime can be substantial. Techniques to automatically identify reuse candidates incorporated insoftware development tools would increase the benefits for software development even more.In this dissertation the incorporation of reuse techniques based on analogical reasoning(AR) in tools for software development is proposed. These techniques use information aboutthe structure and semantics of a model from the analysis of a software system to try to identifypotential analogous models.Analogical reasoning is typically described as consisting of a set of phases. Althoughother AR phases are equally important, the focus of this thesis is on the retrieval and mappingphases of AR. The proposed approach is demonstrated using OOram role models. OOram isan object-oriented modelling notation resembling UML sequence diagrams. OOram modelswere chosen because they focus entirely on the analysis of a problem and does not take intoconsideration what objects will play the various roles in the system. The findings in this thesisare applicable also for such models.A user creates a role model during the analysis of a new project. To prevent too muchdetailed work at this stage, it would be advantageous if a tool could support the process byidentifying reusable candidates from a software development repository. The proposed approachimplements support for a tool that can search a repository for models that are analogousto the model being created. The user must then evaluate the identified models to see ifthey are suitable within the project.AR is used to identify similar cases from different problem domains. A similarity modelfor OOram role models that uses a combination of structural and semantic information aboutthe models to identify similarities is proposed. At the time the ROSA project was initiated, thiswas a natural choice.The requirements of the similarity model are that it is able to distinguish potentiallyuseful models from the ones that cannot be reused. In the approach suggested in this thesis,each named component in the model repository is linked to a word meaning in a term space.This term space is modelle