Analysis of Components for Generalization using Multidimensional Scaling.

To achieve better software quality, to shorten software development time and to lower development costs, software engineers are adopting generative reuse as a software design process. The usage of generic components allows increasing reuse and design productivity in software engineering. Generic component design requires systematic domain analysis to identify similar components as candidates for generalization. However, component feature analysis and identification of components for generalization usually is done ad hoc. In this paper, we propose to apply a data visualization method, called Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), to analyze software components in the multidimensional feature space. Multidimensional data that represent syntactical and semantic features of source code components are mapped to 2D space. The results of MDS are used to partition an initial set of components into groups of similar source code components that can be further used as candidates for generalization. STRESS value is used to estimate the generalizability of a given set of components. Case studies for Java Buffer and Geom class libraries are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]