Enabling predictable assembly

Scott Hissam, Gabriel Moreno, Judith Stafford, Kurt Wallnau
2003 Journal of Systems and Software  
Demands for increased functionality, better quality, and faster time-to-market in software products continue to increase. Component-based development is the software industry's response to these demands. The industry has developed technologies such as EJB and CORBA to assemble components that are created in isolation. Component technologies available today allow designers to plug components together, but do little to allow the developer to reason about how well they will play together.
more » ... le Assembly focuses on issues related to assembling component-based systems that predictably meet their quality attribute requirements. This paper introduces prediction-enabled component technology (PECT) as a means of packaging predictable assembly as a deployable product. A PECT is the integration of a component technology with one or more analysis technologies. Analysis technologies support prediction of assembly properties and also identify required component properties and their 1. Contact Author Scott A. Hissam is a senior member of the technical staff for the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he conducts research on component-based software engineering and Open Source Software. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh. His publications include one book, papers published in international journals including IEEE Internet Computing and Journal of Software Maintenance, and numerous technical reports published by CMU. Prior to his position at the SEI, Mr. Hissam held positions at Lockheed Martin, Bell Atlantic, and the US Department of Defense. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from West Virginia University. Gabriel A. Moreno received the BS degree (honors) in computing systems from University of Mendoza, Argentina, and the Master of Software Engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and a Fulbright Fellow. Previously, he was at ITC Soluciones, Argentina, where he designed and developed multiplatform distributed systems and communication protocols for electronic transactions. His current research interests include predictable assembly, component based software, and software architectures. Judith Stafford is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Stafford has worked for several years in the area of compositional reasoning and its application to software architectures with an emphasis on the use of software architecture as a foundation for early analysis of software systems. Her current research interests include prediction of the behavior of systems composed of software components, compositional reliability analysis, and software architecture documentation. Kurt Wallnau is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Wallnau currently leads the SEI predictable assembly from certifiable components project. Prior to that he led SEI work in the area of commercial-off-the-shelf software, described in the Addison-Wesley book, "Building Systems from Commercial Components."
doi:10.1016/s0164-1212(02)00038-9 fatcat:6avo5xarxvdp3bsu3sirq5iecm