Business component identification - a formal approach

Component based software development is carried out in two phases: component building and application assembly. The key to building business components is a formal approach for identifying the components. The paper describes such an approach, which assists in identifying the components from an Analysis Level Object Model, representing a business domain. The approach makes use of a clustering algorithm, certain constraints, a predefined rule and a set of heuristics. The approach has been implemented in a tool named `CompMaker´ and was used for identifying components for an auto insurance claims domain