Enhancing reuse of Smalltalk methods by conceptual clustering

For a software component to be reusable, it must have two characteristics: it must be designed for reuse, and it must be available for reuse. Object-oriented development enables the reuse of designs and code in future projects. However, the extent to which object-oriented development currently lends itself to such reuse is frequently overstaged. The authors seek to improve the specification and retrieval mechanisms for reusable components in object-oriented languages. They describe and prototype a tool that enables programmers to describe a general specification for a function, in a language independent of detailed design constructs. The computer can then identify, using case-based reasoning, an existing code sample or collection of code samples that matches the specification