Promoting Software Reuse Using Self Organizing Maps

Reusability of software, regardless of its utilizing technique, is widely believed to be a promising means for improving software productivity and reliability. However it is not practiced adequately due to the lack of techniques that facilitate the locating of reusable components that are functionally close. In this paper we apply Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps to develop an approach for promoting Software Reuse. We look at the details of how Self-Organization can arrange and regularize data from the original pattern space into a topology preserving map. We describe a practical implementation of the SOM methodology for Software Reuse using a database of UNIX commands. And finally we briefly present our proposed Software Reuse Methodology.