Software indexing for reuse

Various approaches to software reuse are reviewed and a methodology described. The methodology was developed based on keyboard indexing to retrieve relevant methods in the Smalltalk environment. Important properties that promote software reuse in Smalltalk are encapsulation, inheritance, and dynamic binding. The methodology proposed was initially implemented as a tool in Smalltalk/V Class Hierarchy Browser on a Vienna AOC II personal computer. Special features, such as stop-word lists, stem-word lists, and automatic dictionary generation were implemented and satisfactorily demonstrated. The tool has been ported to Smalltalk-80 on a Macintosh II workstation where increased memory and processing power greatly improved the performance of the tool