State of the Practice: Component-based Software Engineering Course

Component-based development has many potential advantages such as shorter time to market and lower prices. These advantages are especially attractive for customers, who often do not recognize the risks of lower reliability, possible problems with maintenance, etc. Many software companies are forced to use imported components in their products, but are not able to keep the development process under control. Component-based development is still a process with lot of problems, not well defined either from theoretical or practical points of view. The lack of knowledge is probably the biggest problem and the need for component-based software engineering (CBSE) is urgent. This was the motivation to a company and a university to organize a Ph.D. course on CBSE. Both Ph.D. students and practitioners from the industry participated in the course. The aim of the course was to increase the knowledge and understanding of CBSE, and to analyze the needs for software components in different engineering areas. The course consisted of lectures, seminars and student reports on chosen CBSE topics. This paper describes the course, gives an overview of the reports, and discusses the course result.