The quest for software components quality

Component based software development is becoming more generalized, representing a considerable market for the software industry. The perspective of reduced development costs and shorter life cycles acts as a motivation for this expansion. However, several technical issues remain unsolved before the software components industry reaches the maturity exhibited by other component industries. Problems such as the component selection by their integrators, the component catalogs formalization and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components, bring new challenges to the software engineering community. This paper presents an overview of the current research efforts on software components, from a quality assessment perspective. The emerging of empirical component based software engineering practices, to complement the current research trends with a more effective component quality and complexity evaluation, is perceived as a research area that will become very active in a near future.