Beyond Documentation

Software component integration is increasingly permeating product development, impacting everything from government, ecommerce and enterprise application systems. While companies and government agencies attempt to streamline their business and provide better customer service, software and middleware vendors are all vying for dominance to bridge the gap between legacy software and COTS, and the new technology that is available to integrate them. There are a number of major problems with this scenario, particularly those with respect to determining the fit of a component in a multi-component application, instantiating the medium by which components should be connected, assuring that the integration meets security requirements, and defining the enterprise infrastructure that enfolds them. We seek to demystify the integration process. The objective of our research is to efficiently assess qualified software properties, as well as other factors that constrain the multi-component application. To commence the assessment process, we use a software component conspectus that embodies static, architecturally significant properties. These properties can be easily described in the XML, making them portable and extensible, as well as available as part of online documentation. The evaluation produces the major architecture conflicts among the components and any requirements that govern the overall application. The conflicts can then be used to define the basic integration functionality needed for the middleware architecture. Hence, the result of this evaluation is an integration architecture that encompasses the application and the technology that it comprises. As we move toward further characterization of the technology at work in a multi-component application, we envision empowering developers to quickly assess their software components and integration needs. However, a critical issue is getting software and middleware vendors to embrace the conspectus idea: to go beyond traditional documentation toward qualifying a uniform set of properties that make evaluation easier. To develop the assessment technology, we must define the relevant properties of components, communication mediums, middleware, infrastructures and security concerns in a normalized and uniform way. The values of these properties should be easily discernable from documentation, external interfaces, functional paradigms, or application domains. With the advent of this technology businesses can achieve a large payoff by lessening time and developer resources.