Clustering based Architecture for Software Component Selection

Abstract

The component-based software engineering (CBSE) consists of component selection, qualification, adaptation, assembly and updating of components according to the requirements. The focus of this paper is software component selection only. Now-a-days many selection processes, techniques and algorithms are proposed for this task. This paper presents generalized software component selection architecture using clustering. The architecture is divided into four tiers namely Component Requirements and Component Selection Tier, Query and Decision Tier, Application logic tier with Clustering and Component Cluster Tier. The architecture offers manifold advantages like i) presenting a generalized architecture where the existing techniques can be applied, reducing the search space for the component selection. ii) It also illustrates the usage of clustering in the software component selection without the need for pre- specification of number of clusters and considering more than two features while clustering. iii)The cluster validation is performed to check the correctness of the clusters. This complete selection process is validated on a representative instance of set of components.