Combining COSTUME and Azimut+ to Address Functional and Non-functional Requirements in Software Component Selection

Component-based Software Development (CBD) has become recognized as an efficient and effective technique to develop complex software systems. Several component selection techniques already address either functional or non-functional requirements (NFRs), however, NFRs remain hard to be satisfied since most are system-wide properties and cannot be directly associated to components. There are no techniques dealing with cases in which NFRs are shared properties in the system functionality groups. This article proposes to combine the existing techniques COSTUME and Azimut+, where COSTUME groups NFR-sharing functionalities and Azimut+ generates combinations of candidate components for each group. A case study conducted at a local start-up illustrates the proposal.