Towards a methodology for component-driven design

Component-based development has yet to make a big impact in software engineering as it has in other engineering disciplines because the components available for reuse are relatively much more primitive. This means that reused components usually account for a much smaller proportion of the overall intellectual effort invested in new software products than they do in other kinds of products. To rectify this situation more advanced development methodologies are required that encourage and enable software engineers to exploit richer software components - sometimes called "business" components - in the development of new applications. This, in turn, requires more advanced techniques for specifying and retrieving prefabricated components. In this paper we present some initial steps towards such a methodology based on the integration of two independent but complementary technologies - model-based component modeling and test-driven component harvesting.