An initial framework for collaboration-based component selection

Selecting high quality components is the key to component-based system development. There is no lack of literature about evaluating and selecting components. However, most of the proposed methods only focus on the component user side, neglecting what component vendors should contribute to the selection process. This paper provides a more comprehensive component selection process based on a collaboration between component users and vendors. A new semi-formal approach to describing software components has been devised to support the collaboration. The proposed and implemented Software Component Description (SCD) tree provides a vocabulary for specifying components by users and vendors in a collaboration repository SCD can be used as a meta-level description of components at most component marketplaces.