Reusability in multimedia softwares using structural and lexical dependencies

Abstract

Software reuse focuses on developing software using reusability principles. Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is one of the approaches that support software reuse by utilizing reusable software components. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature to mine reusable components from existing object-oriented software. But, almost all of these approaches are dependent on the selection of third-party application software as clients. Therefore, this paper proposes a reusable component identification approach from the source-code of a singular object-oriented software system especially related to multimedia tools. The proposed approach is based on making use of two kinds of dependency relations among different software elements namely structural and lexical relations. These relations, help us to measure cohesion at the component level using two proposed cohesion metrics. The cohesion values are further used as objective functions in the multi-objective search-based evolutionary algorithm, namely NSGA-III to identify the set of reusable components as different clusters. The proposed approach is validated by applying it to six open source Java applications of different sizes and belonging to multimedia domains.