User opinions and rewards in a reuse-based development system

The paper describes a technique for building a closed loop reuse environment obtained by polling user feedback about selected reuse components in order to enhance the system effectiveness. Polling of user choices is exploited in two ways: to tune the retrieval of the software reuse environment and as a basis for a reward system to encourage reuse. Both feedback and reward are made dependent of the user typology through a user profile. An application of the proposed approach to ameliorate the quality of a descriptor based reuse system is illustrated, and some simulation results against a sample component repository are reported.