Abstract not found

Software reuse has been a long term goal of software developers. This goal has been rather elusive, but the widespread use of the object-oriented paradigm and other innovations in software development paradigms have led to renewed interest in this topic. This dissertation describes a new approach for the identification of reusable object-oriented legacy software components. The approach is concept-driven, knowledge-based and tool-assisted and uses heuristics to aid in the natural language understanding of comments and identifiers in object-oriented code. The approach uses a reusability quality factors hierarchy, where low-level object-oriented metrics are used to predict reusability quality factors.

This breakthrough method for sorting through reams of text, linking relevant information while ignoring the irrelevant, has stimulated research into natural language processing and