Component-based software development approach: new opportunities and challenges

The rapidly growing demand for rapid and cost-effective development of large-scale, complex and highly maintainable software systems has introduced a major challenge for the software community. The new trend is to adopt the component-based software development approach to overcome the challenge. The component-based software development approach is based on the concept of developing software systems by selecting building blocks of a new system from off-the-shelf components and assembling the selected components within an approximate software architecture. Consequently, the component-based software development approach has great potential for reducing development time and cost. To build a component-based software system, an organization may select from off-the-shelf components developed by internal or external sources. The development of component-based software systems involves new major activities such as evaluation, selection, customization and integration of off-the-shelf components; and evaluation, selection and creation of software architectures. The focus of the paper is on the key aspects of the component-based software development approach and new opportunities and challenges associated with the approach. The paper describes the new major activities in the component-based systems life cycle, and discusses technical and nontechnical issues that need to be resolved for widespread adoption of this approach. The paper also presents several directions for future research in this area