A support system for software function discovery using histories of function executions

Shuuji Morisaki, Yumi Shiraishi, Masatake Yamato, Akito Monden, Ken Ichi Matsumoto, Koji Torii

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The majority of current application software packages have an extremely large number of functions because of the many different users envisioned for the software. This means that it is not easy for users to find useful functions. In this paper, the authors propose a system that supports the discovery of useful functions for users by allowing for shared referencing of function execution histories among users with similar uses for the software. The proposed system gathers a wide range of function execution histories over a long period of time, efficiently processes them, and then displays in a format that is easy to understand candidate functions that are unknown and useful to the user. The results of evaluation experiments using Microsoft Word 2000 and PowerPoint 2000 showed that an average of 63.7 functions were displayed as useful candidate functions to a total of nine subjects, with an average of 16.1 of them being unknown functions. In addition, the percentage of functions that users said were actually useful among the unknown functions discovered was 39. 2% on average for Word and 46.3% on average for PowerPoint.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)93-106
Number of pages14
JournalSystems and Computers in Japan
Volume35
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 15 2004
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Collaborative filtering
  • Collaborative learning
  • Knowledge sharing
  • Operational history
  • User support

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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