Component-based measurement: few useful guidelines

ABSTRACT

Software industries are striving for new techniques and approaches that could improve software developer productivity, reduce time-to-market, deliver excellent performance and produce systems that are flexible, scalable, secure, and robust. Only software components can meet these demands and following this; component-based software engineering (CBSE) has emerged, which has generated tremendous interest in software development community. The paradigm shift to software components appears inevitable, necessitating drastic changes to current software development and business practices. The scope of this paper is to suggest few necessary guidelines for deriving component-based metrics. The paper discusses issues related to component-based development (CBD) and suggests a general definition of software component based on several existing definitions. Further, the paper outlines the necessity of component measurement and also discusses the limitations of traditional software metrics for component-based development (CBD) systems. Finally, this paper also suggest few necessary guidelines for CBD measurement and proposes some relevant metrics applicable to CBD systems, which after proper quantification and validation may help guiding risk and quality management of component-based systems.

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