Analogy for Software Modeling: The Base Filtering Problem

There is evidence that analogical reasoning play an important role in problem solving within software engineering. When we use analogical reasoning in the early phases of software development, we can reuse knowledge from a known analogous case to support both the modeling and implementation phases of a software development process. In order to support this in a tool, we need a mechanism for establishing analogies between a present case and previous cases. The first stage in analogy matching is the base filtering process. This process selects relevant cases to be tried for match. Indexing of cases is the standard approach and is here done along dimensions each describing properties of models or model components. These properties are identified using heuristics applied in the matching phase of the analogy search. Related values for a property in two cases will indicate support for a match on the basis of a particular heuristic. The most important heuristic used in analogical matching com..