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A systematic approach, state transition browsing method
(STBM), for the reuse of software components library is
presented. This approach can make user easily understand
how to search the components from library and maintain the
library without carefully reading a user guide. The multiple
inheritance class hierarchies are considered in this approach,
instead of tree class hierarchies. To improve the common
drawback of starting searching from the root class each time
for the most conventional linear browsing, we let the
breakpoints in the class hierarchy be the starting points
in searching as applying STBM. Furthermore, the insertion of
a class into a class hierarchy and the deletion of an unused
class from a class hierarchy can also be done by STBM. In
addition, some update rules for searching components
in components library and some balance rules for
restructuring the structure of components library are
derived and proposed. The searching problem due to the
incomplete query specification can also be solved through the
index structure.
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