A Lightweight Taxonomy to Characterize Component-Based Systems

In this paper we propose a taxonomy to characterize component-based systems. The criteria of our taxonomy have been selected as a result of constructing a number of component-based software engineering tools within the Adoption-Centric Software Engineering project at the University of Victoria. We have applied the taxonomy in our work to characterize the resulting tools and to define the design space of our project's proposed tool-building methodology. Our taxonomy strives to capture the most important properties of component-based systems, resulting in a taxonomy that is both course-grained and lightweight. We believe that it is useful for other researchers in a number of ways, for instance, for component selection and to reason about certain quality attributes of components