Experiments on Case-Based Retrieval of Software Designs

1 Software systems are becoming increasingly complex, demanding for more computational resources and better software development methodologies. The software engineer and the CASE tool must work like a team, and for this to happen the CASE tool must be able to understand the user, and to provide new functionalities, such as flexible retrieval of old designs. We think that Case-Based Reasoning can provide a reasoning framework capable of meeting these demands. One important task that a CASE tool based on Case-Based Reasoning can perform adequately is the retrieval of relevant designs. These designs can be stored in a case library, central to the software development company, thus enabling knowledge sharing through out the company. In this paper we present an approach to case-based retrieval of software designs, and provide experimental results describing the main characteristics of this approach.