A (trustad) Component Nomenclature

Component based engineering is gaining substantial interest in the market today. This is because software components offer us the advantage of lesser developmental costs and shorter life cycles. With the continuing rise in the demand for software component based products, the terms component, in-house component, COTS and reusable components have become overloaded and rather conflicting over the past years. This paper attempts to clearly define the above terms. We also propose a seven dimension vector (T, R, U, S, T, A, D) that can be used to specify software components. The seven dimension vector is then used to provide a set of specifications that distinguish between in-house components, COTS components , reusable in-house and reusable COTS components. Since, our nomenclature is based on this seven dimensional TRUSTAD vector; we have chosen to name the classification as the TRUSTAD nomenclature.