Software Component Certification: A Component Quality Model

Component-based software development is becoming more generalized, representing a considerable market for the software industry. The perspective of reduced development costs and shorter life cycles acts as a motivation for this expansion. However, several technical issues remain unsolved before the software components industry reaches the maturity as other software industries. Problems such as component selection, the lack of component catalogs formalization and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components bring new challenges to the software engineering community. On the other hand, software component certification is still immature and much research is needed in order to create well-defined standards for certification. This book introduces a component quality model, based upon consistent and well-defined characteristics, quality attributes and related metrics for the component evaluation. A formal case study was used in order to analyze the viability of the use such of a model.