Retrieval of reusable components using functional similarity

During application development under reuse, much effort is spent in retrieving suitable components. This paper presents an approach to retrieval based on software descriptions of components, and on a mechanism for computing the functional similarity of clusters of reuse candidates. Descriptions are given in a semi-formal fashion and using fuzzy weights for keywords. Algorithms for similarity computation are presented. The experimental tool for this approach manages imprecise queries posed by developers against a software repository; results about reuse of object-oriented code based on the use of the tool are presented, giving measures of recall and precision of the proposed approach.