MAGISTERARBEIT ReUse Cases: Supporting Knowledge Management and Reuse with Self-Organizing Use Case Maps

Abstract

Organizations in today’s software industry are increasingly faced with the challenge of managing information about their past, present, and future projects. The effective and efficient reuse of past knowledge, experience, and assets is one of the key success factors in the software business. To organize the huge number of documents arising during software projects, e. g. use case documents, a digital library offering content-based organization may be used. It allows the user to explore and analyze a potentially unknown library in an intuitive way. In software reuse, finding suitable reuse candidates for a more or less accurately specified problem is one of the critical questions. In knowledge managment, an important issue is finding correct sources of tacit knowledge. Mapping the use cases of a new project to the existing collection may reveal valuable similarities that might not be uncovered by traditional information retrieval methods like key-word based search. This thesis investigates a digital library system based on self-organizing map