An Evaluation Framework for Component-Based and Service-Oriented System Development Methodologies

Abstract

Components-Based Development (CBD) and Web Services (WS) nowadays are prominent paradigms for implementing and deploying advanced distributed information systems. They have been proposed as the ways to support effective business/IT alignment and produce high quality and flexible software solutions that fulfill business goals within short time-to-market. However, current achievements in these areas at the level of methodology are much behind the technology ones. CBD methods proposed so far lack a comprehensive support for component and service concepts throughout the development process. By treating components as packages of implementation artifacts during software deployment or as larger-grained business objects during analysis and design, these methods are not well equipped for modeling loosely coupled coarse-grained components that offer business meaningful services organized in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This chapter presents an evaluation framework that highlights the extent to which a particular method is component-based and service-oriented. The CBD method sample is selected and evaluated using the framework’s concepts and requirements. Based on the evaluation, the method improvements are proposed in order to provide consistent, systematic, and integrated CBD and WS methodology support throughout the lifecycle.