Supporting Component Presence Notifications in Software Development

One of the current approaches to software engineering is Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE). As its name implies, CBSE has to do with the development of open and distributed systems by assembling a set of components. However in practice it is difficult to follow the characteristics demanded by this working philosophy because when developers want to update or modify a component, they do not have the required and sufficient information to determine the degree of impact that a change will have. In order to understand the management of components in CBSE ten experts in software development were interviewed. With the information obtained, the requirements for a system that we call Component Presence Notifier were defined. This system supports the extraction of information from different repositories of the organization and presents it as elements of a graphical user interface (GUI). This information is provided to the developer while working with any of the registered components in order to increase his/her awareness of the impact of the proposed modification. As future work, this prototype will be evaluated for usability by a group of distributed software developers.