Self-certification and trust in component procurement

Component-based software engineering is typically perceived as application development in which existing individual software components are assembled and integrated in order to make up the final product. The main recent technological advances in this field therefore mainly focus on the integration step. This encompasses the syntactic and semantic mapping between components, the development of component wrappers and adapters, and the validation of all pair-wise component interactions. Additionally, prior to integration, components have to be located on a component market place, evaluated for their fitness for the purpose, and selected according to non-functional requirements. These activities are typically referred to as component procurement. Component brokerage platforms provide the support for these early phases of component assembly, and they are indispensable for strengthening the software component market. Although such platforms are good at the provision of components, they are not so good at their certification. This article proposes the combination of two contrasting technologies, component brokerage at one end of the component technology spectrum, and built-in contract testing at its other end, that combined, may alleviate the efforts involved in component certification. This is achieved through the access mechanisms that built-in contract testing provides for components, and additional tester components through which customers can themselves assess the quality of a candidate component that is coming from a broker. Every such extended component is added to the certification according to well-defined standards, that are provided by a third party on behalf of the supplier.