Assignment 13
SCOTT ZWEIG
3/14/04
Questions in Relationship to Software Reuse and CodeBroker
source: Ye, Y., & Fischer, G. (2002) "Supporting Reuse by Delivering Task-Relevant and Personalized Information." In Proceedings of 2002 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'02), Orlando, FL, pp. 513-523. Available at: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/icse2002.pdf.
due: Monday, March 15, 2004
Briefly discuss the following issues:
- 1. what do you consider the main message of the paper?
The main message of this article is the idea for creating a system that would allow software developers to refer to an archive of previously written lines of code while they are designing new code. This so called "repository" of information will act kind of like training wheels, helping the designers by giving them meaningful suggestions and bits of code that might be relevant to their new design. Even though this is a very useful idea, it will be extremely difficult to develop this type of system.
- 2. how is this work applicable to your own
Sometimes when I am writing a paper I will look back on and refer to an old paper that I might have written a year or two earlier. Even if the topics are not in the same ballpark, it is still sometimes helpful to read something old and look at it from a fresh, new angle.
If and when I am designing a website or a flash movie I will often look back to an older piece and (sometimes) I will reuse an action or a color scheme or something that I thought worked well in the past. When something is good and it works, stick with it.
I am not so sure this will qualify, but I never throw anything away, and that includes school projects, assignments, papers and even newspapers. So I guess I keep an archive of all my work, both business and pleasure.
- 3. do you have ideas how the work in the paper could or should be further developed?
Obviously the archive idea is a great one, although it might even be better applied to some other context (i.e. cooking, or teaching).
- 4. have you used any reuse libraries
Like I mentioned before, I never throw anything away. And so my most frequent use of the archival system is probably with my old papers. (I have saved term papers, research papers and opinion papers and all the rest since high school).
- 4.2. if yes: which ones? did the libraries have any particular strengths and weaknesses?
I would say that even though I save all my papers, it is still hard to find the right passage or smart quote that i am looking for. The only way I have to organize them is by the year in which they were written, and that isnt exactly specific enough to get what I am looking for all of the time.
- 5. How does Codebroker infer the "task-at-hand"?
- 6. what are the trade-offs between
- 6.1. to let the systems infer the task-at-hand
- 6.2. versus that the users specifies the task at hand?
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