Evaluation of Component-Based Development Methods

Abstract

Component-based development (CBD) has received a lot of attention in software engineering literature over the last few years. Awareness has been raised that CBD is the way to go in software development, especially in the domain of e-business where the benefits of reusing components, i.e., faster time-to-market and quality, are essential. The question now is how to realize the full potential of CBD? Did we achieve reuse yet? In order to answer these questions, we evaluate and compare five popular methods for component-based development, including Catalysis, the Rational Unified Process, and Select Perspective, on their maturity and fitness-for-use in the context of e-business engineering. The evaluation is done based on our own reference framework for e-business development and a list of objective criteria. The methods each emphasize certain aspects of CBD, but as yet none of them offers a complete solution.