A retrospective on software component quality models

Abstract

The academic and commercial sectors have shown an interest in Component Based Software Development (CBSD) because devel-oping and using various component forms as building blocks can significantly enhance software based system development and use. The perspective of reduced development costs and shorter life-cycles acts as a motivation for this interest. The idea is to create high quality parts and join them together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of appropriate COTS components that meet the user?s require-ments. An important step in the component selection process is the evaluation of components using quality models. Current compo-nent selection approaches try to propose appropriate quality mod-els for the effective assessment of such components. These proposals attempt to define quality characteristics, attributes, and metrics which are specific to the particular nature of components and CBSD. This paper presents a retrospective on the current quality models proposed and are available for the evaluation of software components.