Classifying Software for Reusability

Software reuse has been claimed to be one of the most promising approaches to enhance programmer productivity and software quality. One of the problems to be addresses to achieve high software reuse is organizing databases of software experience, in which information on software products and processes is stored and organized to enhance reuse. The Reuse Description Formalism (RDF) is a generalization of the faceted index approach to classification. It was initially designed as a tool to help increase reusability of software components at the code level (e.g. functions or subroutines). The goal of this dissertation is to show that RDF can also be used effectively to represent and reuse other types of software knowledge.