From Objects to Components - A Quantitative Experiment

Component based software development (CBD) is increasingly becoming a de facto approach to software development. Most software professionals were originally trained to build software using another paradigm, such as the object orientation (OO) paradigm, or the structured programming one. To face the trend to CBD, software professionals are required to make a paradigm shift. Such a shift incurs in considerable costs. This paper describes an experiment where part of a legacy software application built with the OO paradigm was transformed into a software component, using two different technologies (Object Pascal and C++). In this experiment, we were concerned not only with the qualitative aspects of the problems dealt with by a software professional in this transformation, but mostly with some quantitative ones. In particular, we compared the effort required to make such transformations with each of the technologies. The subject performing the experiment was at ease with all the involved OO languages, but not with the component models supported by the used platforms