Software Components Evaluation: an Overview

Objective: To contribute with an overview on the current state of the art concerning metrics-based quality evaluation of software components and component-based assemblies. Method: Comparison of several approaches available in the literature, in terms of their scope, intent, definition technique and maturity. Results: Common shortcomings of current approaches, such as ambiguity in definition, lack of adequacy of the specifying formalisms and insufficient validation of current quality models and metrics for software components. Conclusions: Quality evaluation of components and component-based infrastructures presents new challenges to the Experimental Software Engineering community which are not conveniently dealt with by current approaches.