Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Component-based software engineering

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers\u27 attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together. Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author identifies and studies some of the core issues such as component planning, component building, component assembling, component representation, and component retrieval. A software development process model is developed in this dissertation to emphasize the reuse of existing software components. The software development process model addresses how a software system should be planned and built to maximize the reuse of software components. It conducts domain engineering and application engineering simultaneously to map a software system to a set of existing components in such a way that the development of a software system can reuse the existing software components to the full extent. Besides the planning of software development based on component technology, the migration and integration of legacy systems, most of which are non-component-based systems, to the component-based software systems are studied. A framework and several methodologies are developed to serve as the guidelines of adopting component technology in legacy systems. Component retrieval is also studied in this dissertation. One of the most important issues in component-based software engineering is how to find a software component quickly and accurately in a component repository. A component representation framework is developed in this dissertation to represent software components. Based on the component representation framework, an efficient searching method that combines neural network, information retrieval, and Bayesian inference technology is developed. Finally a prototype component retrieval system is implemented to demonstrate the correctness and feasibility of the proposed method

Leveraging Component-Based Software Engineering with Fraclet

International audienceComponent-based software engineering has achieved wide acceptance in the domain of software engineering by improving productivity, reusability and composition. This success has also encouraged the emergence of a plethora of component models. Nevertheless, even if the abstract models of most of lightweight component models are quite similar, their programming models can still differ a lot. This drawback limits the reuse and composition of components implemented using different programming models. The contribution of this article is to introduce Fraclet as a programming model com- mon to several lightweight component models. This programming model is presented as an annotation framework, which allows the developer to annotate the program code with the elements of the abstract component model. Then, using a generative approach, the annotated program code is completed according to the programming model of the component model to be supported by the component runtime environment. This article shows that this annotation framework provides a significant simplification of the program code by removing all dependencies on the component model interfaces. These benefits are illustrated with the Fractal and OpenCOM component models

Component-based software engineering: a quantitative approach

Dissertação apresentada para a obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaBackground: Often, claims in Component-Based Development (CBD) are only supported by qualitative expert opinion, rather than by quantitative data. This contrasts with the normal practice in other sciences, where a sound experimental validation of claims is standard practice. Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) aims to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, it is common to find experimental validation efforts that are hard to replicate and compare, to build up the body of knowledge in CBD. Objectives: In this dissertation our goals are (i) to contribute to evolution of ESE, in what concerns the replicability and comparability of experimental work, and (ii) to apply our proposals to CBD, thus contributing to its deeper and sounder understanding. Techniques: We propose a process model for ESE, aligned with current experimental best practices, and combine this model with a measurement technique called Ontology-Driven Measurement (ODM). ODM is aimed at improving the state of practice in metrics definition and collection, by making metrics definitions formal and executable,without sacrificing their usability. ODM uses standard technologies that can be well adapted to current integrated development environments. Results: Our contributions include the definition and preliminary validation of a process model for ESE and the proposal of ODM for supporting metrics definition and collection in the context of CBD. We use both the process model and ODM to perform a series experimental works in CBD, including the cross-validation of a component metrics set for JavaBeans, a case study on the influence of practitioners expertise in a sub-process of component development (component code inspections), and an observational study on reusability patterns of pluggable components (Eclipse plug-ins). These experimental works implied proposing, adapting, or selecting adequate ontologies, as well as the formal definition of metrics upon each of those ontologies. Limitations: Although our experimental work covers a variety of component models and, orthogonally, both process and product, the plethora of opportunities for using our quantitative approach to CBD is far from exhausted. Conclusions: The main contribution of this dissertation is the illustration, through practical examples, of how we can combine our experimental process model with ODM to support the experimental validation of claims in the context of CBD, in a repeatable and comparable way. In addition, the techniques proposed in this dissertation are generic and can be applied to other software development paradigms.Departamento de Informática of the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL); Centro de Informática e Tecnologias da Informação of the FCT/UNL; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the STACOS project(POSI/CHS/48875/2002); The Experimental Software Engineering Network (ESERNET);Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO); Association forComputing Machinery (ACM

A Prelimanary Exploration on component based software engineering

Component-based software development (CBD) is a methodology that has been embraced by the software industry to accelerate development, save costs and timelines, minimize testing requirements, and boost quality and output. Compared to the conventional software development approach, this led to the system's development being completed more quickly. By choosing components, identifying systems, and evaluating those systems, CBSE contributes significantly to the software development process. The objective of CBSE is to codify and standardize all disciplines that support CBD-related operations. Analysis of the comparison between component-based and scripting technologies reveals that, in terms of qualitative performance, component-based technologies scale more effectively. Further study and application of CBSE are directly related to the CBD approach's success. This paper explores the introductory concepts and comparative analysis related to component-based software engineering which have been around for a while, but proper adaption of CBSE are still lacking issues are also focused

Component-Based Software Engineering - New Challenges in Software Development

The primary role of component-based software engineering is to address the development of systems as an assembly of parts (components), the development of parts as reusable entities, and the maintenance and upgrading of systems by customising and replacing such parts. This requires established methodologies and tool support covering the entire component and system lifecycle including technological, organisational, marketing, legal, and other aspects. The traditional disciplines from software engineering need new methodologies to support component-based development

Reducing Errors in Excel Models with Component-Based Software Engineering

Model errors are pervasive and can be catastrophic. We can reduce model errors and time to market by applying Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) concepts to Excel models. CBSE assembles solutions from pre-built, pre-tested components rather than written from formulas. This is made possible by the introduction of LAMBDA. LAMBDA is an Excel function that creates functions from Excel's formulas. CBSE-compliant LAMBDA functions can be reused in any project just like any Excel function. They also look exactly like Excel's native functions such as SUM(). This makes it possible for even junior modelers to leverage CBSE-compliant LAMBDAs to develop models quicker with fewer errors.Comment: 27 page

Metrics Used In Component Based Software Engineering

Abstract-Component Based Software Engineering is a big concern in Industry. CBSE is a process that follows the principle of design and construction of computer based systems using reusable software components. A component is an independent and replaceable part of a system that performs a clear function in the context of a well defined architecture. It results in better productivity, improved quality, reduction in time spent and cost to develop. Software metrics determine the different aspects of software complexity and therefore play an important role in analyzing and improving the quality of software. These metrics play an important role in guiding the software development and deployment models. Metrics used in component based software engineering are helpful in achieving the quality and managing risk in component based system by checking the factors that affect risk and quality. Metrics are helpful in case of the business systems for retrieving large amount of data. Metrics help the developer in identifying the probable risks so that proper corrective action can be taken. Metrics should be defined in a formal manner because natural language creates problem. Various metrics has been proposed to measure the different attributes of a component like functionality, interactivity, complexity, reusability etc. Keywords-component based software engineering (CBSE), Software metrics in CBSE

A conceptual model for megaprogramming

Megaprogramming is component-based software engineering and life-cycle management. Magaprogramming and its relationship to other research initiatives (common prototyping system/common prototyping language, domain specific software architectures, and software understanding) are analyzed. The desirable attributes of megaprogramming software components are identified and a software development model and resulting prototype megaprogramming system (library interconnection language extended by annotated Ada) are described