Multi-View Retrieval Of Software Design Specifications Using Similarity Assessment Approach
Loading...
Date
2017
Authors
Adamu, Alhassan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
This study examines how software designs that are modelled using Unified Modelling Language (UML) can be reused. A notable understanding is that UML model software systems from different but related perspectives. The main issues that arise when reusing these designs is how the similarity between the UML artifacts can be computed from multiple perspectives. However, there is no definitive approach that computes the similarity between the UML artifacts across the views while maintaining the consistency across these views. Consequently, this thesis proposes a new similarity assessment approach that facilitates the computation of similarity between UML artifacts from multiple perspectives. The primary approach is to compute the similarity of UML artifacts from three independent perspectives of structural, functional, and behavioural perspectives. The Multiview similarity is computed as weighted sum of the independent perspectives and then scaled by the result of factor called inconsistency penalty. The inconsistency penalty handles the conflicting mapping between structured diagram and functional diagrams and structured diagram with behavioural diagrams. Additionally, a pre-filtering technique to sieve out the number of repository models prior to retrieval stage is proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed Multiview retrieval approach outperformed the single view retrieval approach in retrieving the most relevant software projects from repository with Mean Average Precision of up to 92% and correlation with reuse effort of 83.9%. Furthermore, the proposed pre-filtering technique leads to significant reduction in retrieval time by approximately a factor of 10. Therefore, it is recommended to use Multiview approach during software design reuse.
Description
Keywords
Multi-view retrieval of software design specifications , using similarity assessment approach