Software components - enabling a mass market

Component based software engineering, the building of software systems from reusable parts, offers the potential to radically improve the way in which software is developed. It promises increased reuse leading to higher quality and reduced time to market. In addition, if component parts are available 'off the shelf' then we can expect to see the emergence of a thriving market in new ever-better components. This should enable those who integrate components into whole systems to adapt and improve such systems rapidly and predictably by replacing old components with new and better ones. This paper reports on work undertaken within CLARiFi, a European-funded project, which aimed to provide a supportive infrastructure to enable such a component marketplace. The infrastructure is manifested through the design, development and evaluation of a series of pre-industrial component broker prototypes. The underlying research areas include the component classification scheme, ranking and selection of components, component certification and visualization in the ranking and selection process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned from the prototyping and evaluation activities carried out throughout the project.