Supporting Evolution in Component-based Development using Component Libraries

Component-based software development (CBSD) is a very promising software engineering technique for improv-ing reuse and maintenance. Nevertheless, there are still some difficulties in practice when reusing, maintaining and evolving components and/or component-based (CB) appli-cations. In this paper, we review the concepts of version and configuration management and apply them in the con-text of CBSD. The use of multi-dimensional component li-braries, which are software libraries that classify compo-nents with respect to different views, is proposed. Next to the libraries, we propose a configuration model for CB appli-cations based on components and connectors. In this way, the libraries not only support components ’ storage and re-trieval but also version and configuration management of components and CB applications. Furthermore it is pos-sible to introduce metrics in the configuration model and libraries allowing to predict the impact of changes in CB systems. 1