M.A.: An Integrated facet-based library for arbitrary software components

Abstract. Reuse is an important means of reducing costs and effort during the development of complex software systems. A major challenge is to find suitable components in a large library with reasonable effort. This becomes even harder in today’s development practice where a va-riety of artefacts such as models and documents play an equally impor-tant role as source code. Thus, different types of heterogeneous compo-nents exist and require consideration in a component search process. One flexible approach to structure (software component) libraries is faceted classification. Faceted classifications and in particular faceted browsing are nowadays widely used in online systems. This paper takes a fresh approach towards using faceted classification in heterogeneous software component libraries by transferring faceted browsing concepts from the web to software component libraries. It presents an architecture and im-plementation of such a library. This implementation is used to evaluate the applicability of facets in the context of an industry-driven case study.