CoDIT: Bridging the gap between system-level and component-level development

Abstract

Component-based development traditionally recognizes two parallel views (system-level view and component-level view), which correspond to two major concerns -development of a an application and development of a reusable component for the use in application development. By having different objectives, these views have relatively disparate notion of a component, which consequently means that they are difficult (yet necessary) to combine. In this paper, we propose a method (named CoDIT), which spans the gap between the two views by providing a synchronisation between system-level view (expressed in UML 2) and componentlevel view. For component-level view, the method supports component frameworks with method-call as the communication style. The variability in the composition mechanisms of the component frameworks is addressed by using principles of metacomponent systems. The benefits of the proposed method are evaluated on a real-life case study (in SOFA 2) together with measurements of development efforts. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.