Software Component Selection techniques - A review

Component Based Software Engineering(CBSE) relies on the premise of reuse and aims to develop systems by selecting appropriate off the shelf software components and integrating them in order to achieve its desired task. Usage of COTS component ensures faster time-to-market. At the same time, component-based software introduces risks like unknown quality properties of the components in use, that can inject harmful side effects into the final system. Therefore, component selection is one of the most tedious and challenging tasks of CBSE and involves simultaneous consideration of multiple selection criteria as per the user requirements. This is a review paper which aims to study some of the various formal software selection techniques that have been introduced in the literature so far, pointing out the benefits and limitations of each and what could be the future work possible with respect to the already introduced techniques. Keywords— software component selection, component based software engineering, multi criteria decision making, formal software selection process, software component.