Estudo experimental comparativo de modelos de componentes para o desenvolvimento de software sob o aspecto de evolutibilidade.

Abstract

The use of component-based software development (CBD) offers advantages as production time, cost and maintainability. Therefore, CBD presents itself as a viable approach to attend the requirements of current systems, such as: dynamism, robustness, and requisite change possibility. However, one cannot be sure that only by using components, the software will be able to attend to these requirements and evolve maintaining, at the same time, its consistency. Attributes such as evolutionability, directly related to systems' architecture, have not been sufciently explored on studies involving CBD. In this context, an experimental study comparing the component model EJB, COMPOR and CORBA is performed in the present work, focusing on software evolution. In this study, it is used a measurement framework composed by one quality model and one set of the software metrics for capturing information about the system in terms of the software basic attributes. The study is divided into two parts: the construction phase and the evolution phase. In the evolution phase it is possible to observe the behavior of each component model in face of evolution scenarios. By means of this experimental study, it will be created a knowledge base on analyzed component models, making possible to correctly choose between the component models that best ts the requirements of the system to be developed. Moreover, a set of reusable metrics that can serve as a measurement parameter on other studies about evolution in CBD is created.