B. Agile Software Development

 

Component-based development is a software development approach where the entire lifecycle of the software creation, development deployment and maintenance is centred on the start-to-finish concept of component lifecycle. Figure 3 depicts a component-based development (CBD) process. The CBD process has five phases, namely Requirements, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Testing. Artifact is produced at each phase which in turn is the inputs to different types of testing shown in Figure 3.

 

The component has its own lifecycle and it is related with the whole system lifecycle. Agile software development can be applied in component-based software development. Further reading for the adaptation of agile techniques into traditional software methodology for Rational Unified Process (RUP), for example, is described in [19]. Any of the agile software development methodologies such as extreme programming (XP) [11], IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) [11], etc can be applied to component-based software development:

 

Fig. 3: An Illustration of CBD Process

 

The following Figure 4 gives a snapshot of software development lifecycle activities, for RUP.

 

Fig. 4: A typical software development lifecycle activities

 

The context for Web Services activities in each of the software lifecycle phases is absent from the methodology. The best approach of bridging this gap is to analyze the special characteristics of Web Services and its best practices to be considered at different phases of the software lifecycle. The following section discusses the Web Services development steps and its characteristics.