An Architecture-Centric Development Environment for Black-Box Component-Based Systems

Abstract

Component-based software system development typifies traditional engineering philosophy by promoting the construction of systems from pre-fabricated software components. Underlying this philosophy is the promise of accelerated, low cost development and reliable software systems. However, the development strategy is hampered by the lack of practical methods and tools that support the reuse-driven paradigm embodied in black-box components. Current methods and tool environments provide poor support for the challenges posed by developing systems from off-the-shelf black-box components. These include poor support for: component discovery and verification, modelling and mapping requirements to component architectures, negotiation, architectural design and composition, and managing change. This paper describes an architecture-centric approach and environment for formulating, integrating and deploying black-box component-based systems. Practical experience of using the approach is illustrated with a real case study.