ABSTRACT
Component-based development (CBD) moves organizations from application development to application assembly, involving the use of third-party, prefabricated pieces (commercial off-the-shelf components, COTS) and spiral development methodologies. Although a software component market is still quite slow to develop, effective use of software components is slowly becoming a valid technology for the building of software systems. Moreover, the complexity of the applications is continuously growing, and the amount of the information about components is becoming too large to be handled by human intermediaries. Therefore, automated trading of components will play a critical role in CBD. This chapter underlines the need of linking three areas of the COTS CBD: the documentation and specification of COTS components, the description of COTS-based software architectures, and the trading processes for COTS components. A trading-based development method (TBDM), a three-tier method to build software applications as an assembly of COTS software components, is presented. A sample implementation is illustrated.
