Modeling of component based systems

Abstract

Component based software development (CBSD) becomes a popular paradigm for Internet based systems. Compared to other popular paradigms, CBSD supports the development from reusable components other than the development from the scratch. Consequently, modeling becomes more important than programming and the modeling techniques in traditional paradigms have to be changed more or less. Particularly, improper selection and misuse of modeling techniques would prevent the target system from benefiting from CBSD and even make the project fail. For helping researchers and practitioners to equip with CBSD, this tutorial will provide basic knowledge and skill of modeling component based systems systematically. Firstly, we will introduce the technical and non-technical motivations of CBSD with emphasis on software reuse which puts a significant impact on modeling. Secondly, we will present a systematic approach to modeling component based systems with a set of existing well-proved modeling techniques, including feature modeling for requirements specification, architecture modeling for abstract design, and object oriented modeling for detailed design. These modeling techniques and a real-life project will be discussed in details in the rest of the tutorial.