Usability measures for software components

The last decade marked the first real attempt to turn software development into engineering through the concepts of Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, with the goal of creating high-quality parts that could be joined together to form a functioning system. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of the software components (from either in-house or external repositories) that fulfill some architectural and user-defined requirements. However, there is currently a lack of quality models and metrics that can help evaluate the quality characteristics of software components during this selection process. This paper presents a set of measures to assess the Usability of software components, and describes the method followed to obtain and validate them.