A Software Component Maturity Model (SCMM)

Component-based software development (CBSD) is focused on assembling existing components to build a software system, with a potential benefit of delivering quality systems more fast, thus, increasing its productivity. These benefits are just achieved if the software components used to compose the software system were previously evaluated in order to establish a certain quality level. However, there are a set of different risk- levels associated to each software component, depending, mainly, on its application domain. In this way, we aim to propose a software component maturity model in order to assure quality for each kind of software component risk-level, describing its levels, techniques adopted and the guidelines for selecting evaluation levels. A preliminary case study was accomplished in order to prove its real applicability and viability.