A Software Component Quality Model: A Preliminary Evaluation

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 software component´s industry reaches the maturity exhibited by other component industries. Problems such as the component selection by their integrators and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components, bring new challenges to the software engineering community. By the other hand, the software components certification area is still immature and further research is needed in order to obtain well-defined standards for certification. In this way, we aim to propose a component quality model, describing consistent and well-defined characteristics, quality attributes and related metrics for the components evaluation. A preliminary evaluation to analyze the results of using the component quality model proposed is also presented