A Software Component Recommendation System Based on Development Context

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In modern software development, many of software products are built by combining existing software components and coding only minimal required features. However, selecting necessary components from a number of components is not easy. For instance, Java 2 SDK Standard Edition (J2SE) Version 1.41_02 is widely used by software developers and provides them with 5568 software components (basis classes). From our pilot experiments, we have found that only 4% of the software components of Java 2 SDK were used in typical software development. This result indicates additional coding is still much required, while a variety of software components are currently available to reuse.The goal of our study is to realize an efficient environment for components-based software development. Toward achieving the goal, in this research project, we constructed a system that recommends required software components to developers according to the context of software development. Especially we focused on developing the following elemental technologies:(A). Birthmark: a technology to analyze the development context which means the progress and/or completeness of development, features and/or structures of software itself, and so forth, by extracting the amount of characteristics from target software under development,(B). Collaborative Filtering: a technology to identity and recommend software components which have context similar to target software, and(C). Association Visualization: a visualization technology to provide developers with reasons why the system recommends software components to developers.We integrated the three technologies into a system and evaluated it.