Collaborative Tagging for Software Reuse

Abstract

The recent progress in the open source and component based technologies has offered many facilities in the field of software reuse. However, this advancement has also brought the challenge such as designing repositories and developing efficient search mechanism to retrieve software assets. Software reuse is a not a new area of research in software engineering,Most of work is going on in this field has not resulted in wide acceptance of reuse programs in organizations due to technical and human issues. Researchers are trying to invent techniques that increase the efficiency and scalability of software repositories. This dissertation provides an alternative approach of collaborative tagging to organize software artifacts. We present a software reuse framework for the organization of software artifacts, which can be used as the basis for building software repositories. This model includes representation of software artifacts like code snippets, SRS or test cases in a unique representational path form. This model also contains operations to assign tags (or keywords) to artifacts, which include storing, browsing and searching them. The work has been verified with users of the system and subsequent results have been reported and analyzed. As the work in these kinds of systems is still in nascent stage, we have also represented the limitation, apart from advantages and future directions.