A study on software component selection methods

Performing a good component selection plays a critical role in the success of the final system. Although the history of component selection process in component based software development is almost a decade old, we have found that no selection process addresses the use of previous decision experience for selecting components for similar requirements. In this research we argue that previous knowledge and decision on component selection can definitely reduce time for selection activities by guiding us through previous successful or failed case experience. To incorporate the use of previous decision experience, we introduced case based reasoning (CBR) in component selection. We have shown the suitability of using CBR in component selection and finally proposed our conceptual approach of a new component selection method using CBR.