Component-Based Software Engineering: Technologies, Quality Assurance Schemes, and Risk Analysis Tools

Component-based software development approach is based on the idea to develop software systems by selecting appropriate off-the-shelf components and then to assemble them with a well-defined software architecture. Because the new software development paradigm is much different from the traditional approach, quality assurance (QA) for component-based software development is a new topic in the software engineering community. In this paper, we survey current component -based software technologies, describe their advantages and disadvantages, and discuss the features they inherit. We also address QA issues for component-based software. As a major contribution, we propose a QA model for component-based software development, which covers component requirement analysis, component development, component certification, component customization, and system architecture design, integration, testing, and maintenance. We also look at the advantages of the Analyzer for Reducing Module Operational Risk (RMOR) tool, and collect some widely adopted Java metrics and tool suites. As our future work we will upgrade ARMOR to windows platformed, off-shelf commercial components based, Java source code oriented risk analysis and evaluation tool.