A Method Based on Naming Similarity to Identify Reuse Opportunities

Abstract

Software reuse is a development strategy in which existing software components, called reusable assets, are used in the development of new software systems. There are many advantages of reuse in software development, such as minimization of development efforts and improvement of software quality. New methods for reusable asset extraction are essential to achieve these advantages. Extraction methods may be used in different contexts including software product lines derivation. However, few methods have been proposed in literature for reusable asset extraction and recommendation of these reuse opportunities. In this paper, we propose a method for extraction of reuse opportunities based on naming similarity of two types of object-oriented entities: classes and methods. Our method, called JReuse, computes a similarity function to identify similarly named classes and methods from a set of software systems from a domain. These classes and methods compose a repository with reuse opportunities. We also present a prototype tool to support the extraction by applying our method. We evaluate the method with 38 e-commerce information systems mined from GitHub. As a result, we observe that our method is able to identify classes and methods that are relevant in the e-commerce domain.