eColabra An Enterprise Collaboration & Reuse Environment

In this paper we present a new methodology to achieve reuse and knowledge sharing, by applying information retrieval techniques to OO resources while exploiting the OO language semantics and characteristics. We present a methodology that can cut down costs not only of development and maintenance but also reduce the “time to market”. Unlike traditional reuse processes/infrastructures, we show that applying our methodology requires extremely low investment, leading to a Win Win solution. This is achieved by our environment based on autonomous tools that require no support while implementing our approach. We further describe novel techniques to combine free text and attribute based searches and show how they improve search precision. In addition eColabra server collects valuable statistics which can serve as the organization’ knowledge management infrastructure.