INCREMENTAL CONSTRUCTION OFCOMPONENT-BASED SYSTEMS: ASTUDY BASED ON CURRENTCOMPONENT MODELS

Abstract

Incremental system construction aims to build systems iteratively by adding incrementsin a stepwise manner, starting from a small initial system. Such an approachholds the promise of managing scale and complexity, and should therefore be usefulfor building large systems. In the context of software development, many approachesbased on refinement have been proposed for incremental system construction. In general,these approaches are top-down and not bottom-up.The view taken in this thesis is that, incremental construction is intrinsically bottomup,and would therefore be easier to achieve by means of Component-based Development(CBD), which is also intrinsically bottom-up. In this thesis, we investigate howincremental system construction can be achieved in CBD. We study incremental constructionin the context of the three main categories of current component models,namely models where components are: (i) objects, (ii) architectural units, and (iii)encapsulated components.By studying and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of these three categoriesof component models with respect to our notion of incremental construction, we showthat incremental construction can be achieved most easily with component modelswith encapsulated components. We propose the construction guidelines to achieveincremental construction by using our extended X-MAN component model. In orderto demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we apply it to construct the cash desksystem in the CoCoME example.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Suzanne Embury (Supervisor)