Maintaining Component-Based Systems

systems were comprised of subroutines and procedures formatted in source code. Typical maintenance on such systems would include impact analysis, which determines if and how different system parts interact, and regression testing, which uses test code inputs from earlier versions to ensure system integrity after maintenance. For such systems, impact analysis was often sufficient to determine whether maintenance in one procedure would affect another procedure and could thus be used to limit retesting to relevant procedures. However, these traditional maintenance procedures—which rely on source code visibility—are insufficient to contend with the maintenance demands of component-based development. The growing use of components is fueled by object-oriented design and will drastically change how we build and maintain systems. “Componentware”software can be commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), public domain, freeware, shareware, or “copyleft” (more on this later). When these components are incorporated into a system, Jeffrey Voas, Reliable Software Technologies Maintaining Component-Based Systems As we increas ing ly re ly on so f t ware comp onents to bu i ld our appl i cat ions, we must re th ink our so f t ware maintenance st rateg ies. Fo l lowing i s an over v iew of the maintenance cha l lenges ra i sed by comp onent-based deve lopment.