ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the foundations of a software development approach that promotes the “build-by-integration” paradigm. So far, both the traditional and the object-oriented methodologies have offered sophisticated processes oriented toward defining the final development activity as “code writing.” In contrast to such established practices, we propose to orient the entire development toward composing complex software systems using already implemented components. This concern is consistently maintained throughout the development, starting with requirements modeling. A graphical language is utilized to represent components in both abstract and physical levels within the main modeling view, that is, structural breakdown. This chapter relates the new notions to the existing concepts. The proposed approach is introduced and partially demonstrated through examples represented with graphical models.
