Analyzing and understanding architectural characteristics of COM+ components

Understanding architectural characteristics of software components that constitute distributed systems is crucial for maintaining and evolving them. One component framework heavily used for developing component-based software systems is Microsoft´s COM+. In this paper we particularly concentrate on the analysis of COM+ components and introduce an iterative and interactive approach that combines component inspection techniques with source code analysis to obtain a complete abstract model of each COM+ component. The model describes important architectural characteristics such as transactions, security, and persistency, as well as creating and use dependencies between components, and maps these higher-level concepts down to their implementation in source files. Based on the model, engineers can browse the software system´s COM+ components and navigate from the list of architectural characteristics to the corresponding source code statements. We also discuss the Island Hopper application with which our approach has been validated.