Maintenance-oriented selection of software components

Component-based software engineering is a new, promising, and rapidly growing discipline in both academia and industry. However, maintaining component-based systems (CBSs) introduces new issues: the choice of the components requires identifying a set of parameters that characterize them, in order to select the appropriate ones for a specific software system. In our research we propose a characterization of components aimed at foreseeing the maintenance effort of the CBS. In this paper we perform an empirical study in the context of three industrial software projects to assess these parameters. Our experience suggests a number of components characteristics, which can be useful for the purpose above. Moreover, the study produced some lessons learned, useful for building software applications easy to maintain. The results show that the lessons learned could be generalized, although further empirical studies are required.