Protecting Intellectual Property by Certified Component Quality Descriptions

A major part of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) focuses on composing systems of independent components and the re-use of components. Descriptions of the quality of components allow assuring the quality of the composed system. Certification addresses trust issues regarding the trustworthiness of the descriptions, e.g. in components of the shelf (COTS) scenarios. Selecting components based on quality descriptions allows protecting intellectual property (IP) of the component supplier during selection but the development process must support certification and compositional evaluations. Different certification levels are available which affect the distribution of certification effort across participating roles depending on the need for IP protection and described quality characteristic. Existing CBSE approaches neglect a clear integration of description-based selection in the development process and provide no guidelines on selecting the appropriate certification level for a component. In this paper, we show how certification of quality descriptions can be integrated into a CBSE development process. Additionally, we provide a guideline supporting the selection of a certification level and point out the implications on the effort distribution on the different participating roles. The application of the guideline is demonstrated in three different scenarios and the most suitable certification level is identified, which allows tailoring a CBSE-aware certification process.