Use case retrieval using terms and use case structure similarity computation

Abstract

Software reuse is a key component of software engineering methodology as it helps software developers to reduce cost of software development process. At present, the software industry is highly competitive among organizations. Therefore, software developers have to find ways to reduce cost of software production as much as they can. Software reuse in a part of software requirements specification collected in a form of use case description can reduce much redundant works. Thus, this leads to the reduction of cost and time of software production. The objective of this thesis is to analyzed and design an approach for retrieving use case considering similarity of terms and structure of use cases. Information storage and retrieval theories such as automatic indexing, term weighting system, document similarity computation, and retrieval evaluation are applied in this approach. As a result, this research develops a tool to test the proposed approach. The experiment is also designed to compare this proposed approach to the existing approach which considers only terms similarity. The 3 metrics named recall, precision, and harmonic mean of information storage and retrieval theory are used to evaluate use case retrieval results. The results of this experiment indicate that this proposed approach is more effective than the existing approach.