An Integrated Facet-based Library for Arbitrary Software Components

2010 research paper

In Proc. of 6th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA’10), volume 6138 of LNCS, Springer
with: Matthias Schmidt, Jan Polowinski, and Miguel A. Fernández

Reuse is an important means of reducing costs and effort during the development of complex software systems. A major challenge is to find suitable components in a large library with reasonable effort. This becomes even harder in today’s development practice where a variety of artefacts such as models and documents play an equally important role as source code. Thus, different types of heterogeneous components exist and require consideration in a component search process. One flexible approach to structure (software component) libraries is faceted classification. Faceted classifications and in particular faceted browsing are nowadays widely used in online systems. This paper takes a fresh approach towards using faceted classification in heterogeneous software component libraries by transferring faceted browsing concepts from the web to software component libraries. It presents an architecture and implementation of such a library. This implementation is used to evaluate the applicability of facets in the context of an industry-driven case study.