Component-Based Software Engineering

This approach is based on systematic reuse where systems are integrated from existing components or COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems. For instance there are applications which need image processing, and such application can be developed using existing components available in the market. Such components can be plugged into your applications through well known interfaces and all image processing related functionalities will be done by the component that you have purchased. So you do not need to focus on development of complex image processing algorithms rather you can concentrate on end product that you need to develop.

Component-based software engineering has following process stages.

Component Analysis

In this stage you analyse existing components which can be used for your purposes. There are many components available in the market for same purpose. You must carefully analyze all components and select that really matches your requirement.

Requirements Modification

Since you are using existing component which will not be completely match your requirements. Hence you might do some slight modification for your requirements.

System Design with Reuse

At this stage you have already selected appropriate components and your design will be based on the components you have already selected.

Development and Integration

Your selected components will be interacted with your application development stage.

There are companies concentrate only on component development and market those components. For example, you can find Activex Components, DLLs, and JAVA Packages etc for different purpose components. You can integrate those components to your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) easily. This approach is becoming increasingly used as component standards have emerged and widely available.