Component Based Software Engineering

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE), which deals with the software construction by components' assembly, is an extension of Software Engineering. A conventional Software Engineering process deals with ‘Creation of a new system' from scratch whereas a CBSE process does the same through ‘Composition making use of existing components'. This basic change in nature of development indicates that the conventional software processes need to be redefined in order to make them applicable to CBSE. This work purposefully considers software processes and maturity models for CBSE. A meaningful part of this work attempts to capture the idea of dependence and demonstrate a method for the dependence analysis among software components in a quantitative manner. Necessary discussion on composability issues in CBSE has also been elaborated as part of this work. The researchers and practitioners dealing with CBSE can find the discussion, observations and conclusions reported herein useful. It may serve the purpose of study material for graduate courses on CBSE processes, dependability and composability issues.