An approach toward mechanization of acquiring reusable software components

This paper gives a method for acquiring reusable software components automatically. Two categories of resources are distinguished, i.e., reusable patterns and reusable building blocks. It employs explanation--based learning method to analyse the concrete software design and generate its structural description, which, combined with semantic constraints, constitutes the reusable patterns. In order to obtain reusable building blocks, it applies both deduction and induction to construct the functional description of code fragment hierarchically, which, associated with code, is truly reusable in some sense. The ability of the system is enhanced with the acquisition of these reusable components and the scope of solvable problems is enlarged by employing them.