A review on the component evaluation approaches to support software reuse

Abstract

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is becoming popular due to the benefits of software reuse and the availability of many alternatives of reusable components. By reusing existing software components that have already been tested, software engineers may reduce errors and shorten the time to market the system under development. However, software engineers still have a problem in selecting the existing reusable components as well as difficulties in determining the quality of the developed components for future reuse. Therefore, an appropriate component evaluation framework is extremely needed to harvest the full benefits of software reuse. In this paper, we present the comparative evaluation of the state of-the-art component evaluation approaches with an emphasize on reusability. The results presented in this paper are very useful in achieving the ultimate aim of our research i.e. providing a holistic component evaluation approach that may assist software engineer both in the selection of the existing reusable components and the development of new reusable components.