Component-based Software Engineering - New Challenges in Software Development

We are witnesses of enormous expansion of software in business, industry, research, everyday life. Software is becoming the key factor for success even in traditionally non-software areas. Most of the software users are non-experts. These trends raise new demands on software. Usability, robustness, simple installations and integrations become the most important features of software. As software supports more and more different areas, the requirements for integration of different areas become stronger. The consequence of this is that software is increasing in size and complexity. The main challenge of software today is to manage the complexity and adaptability to the changes. A new approach, focusing on reuse of existing pieces of software and developing reusable entities and based on new component technologies, such as COM/DCM such as Javabeans, is becoming dominant: Component-based development. Although very promising, component-based development shows weakness in many aspects, which is the consequence of lack of methodology, process and tools support. A new discipline of software engineering Component-based Software Engineering is in focus of researchers and industry. The primary role of Component-based Software Engineering is to deal with developing systems from parts (components), developing parts as reusable entities, and maintaining and improve systems by customising and replacing those parts. This requires established methodologies and tool support covering the entire component and product lifecycle, the organisational, marketing, legal, and other aspects. In addition to new technologies, also other disciplines from software engineering need new methodologies. For example, the development lifecycle model is different for building components from building systems from components. Some of the disciplines become more important. One example is Software Architecture, which primary goal is to define the system structure consisting of components and relation between them. In component-based approach the components exist not only as logical, but also as physical entities, recognizable and deployable at run-time. For this reason the architectural questions are as significant for the run-time phase as for the design phase. There are many other disciplines that require new approach. The success of the component-based development depends directly of successful research and implementation of component-based software engineering.