Title: Component Identification Framework and Toolkit (CIFT) in Support
of Reusable Class Libraries
May 1997
Author: Shahin Samadi, Department of Computer Science, The George
Washington University
Dissertation directed by: Carol Dianne Martin, Professor of Engineering
and Applied Science
Abstract:
For any software reuse approach to be successful, it must be an indispensable
part of the software development life cycle. An essential step in the software
reuse process is finding the components that meet a development need. A
well constructed reusable class structure (minimum coupling and maximum
cohesion) packaged with a well-defined message passing mechanism can be
used as a building block throughout the development of many object-oriented
software systems. There are a variety of well-mainatined class libraries
available on the Internet. In addition, there are easy to use searching
mechanisms to look for particular libraries on the net.
A World Wide Web based framework, Component Identification Framework
and Toolkit (CIFT) was developed to use a set of predefined facets to extract
the syntactic information of a class library and its content. This is information
is mapped into information-layers based on their importance to the ruse
activity. These layers are used to present a hierarchical and visual map
of the library using the object-oriented software development notations.
Reuse would then utilize this visual map as an interface to browse the
content of the library. A study was done using a prototype toolkit based
on this framework. The results of the study show that CIFT can be effective
in assisting software developers to identify their desired reusable classes
in the early stages of the development life cycle.