Estimation of quality for software components

Abstract

Component-Based Development (CBD) approach now is widely accepted in software industry. This approach enables efficient application development through the integration of already developed software components. The success of these applications heavily depends upon the selection of appropriate components to fit customer requirements. Therefore it is very necessary to evaluate the quality of components before using them in the final system. Quality models proposed so far can not be fully implemented as-it-is on components and component-based systems (CBS) due to architectural differences in the development approach. Present paper surveys a number of quality models for traditional and component-based systems and proposes a new model for CBS by proposing some new characteristics, which may be very relevant in the context of components. All the quality characteristics may not be of prime importance for an application to be developed for a specific domain. Therefore, it is necessary to identify only those characteristics/sub-characteristics, which may have higher priorities over the others. The present work uses Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assign the weight values to the characteristics for the proposed model. These weight values are then used to evaluate the quality contribution of sub-characteristics, characteristics and then finally the overall quality of the component by using the appropriate metrics. This approach can be used to identify and select better quality component among several others which can be used in the final system.