Lessons learned through six years of component-based development
Michael Sparling · Communications of the ACM · 2000
There must be some truth to the theory that computer software development in "Internet time," much like a dog's life, actually compresses seven years of experience, effort and activity into a single year. It has been six years since the author's organization, Castek, embarked upon a voyage of component-based application development. In that time the author has successfully delivered a series of large, enterprise-class applications using component-based development and related techniques. These systems have encompassed many parts of the financial services application domain including bill presentation and reconciliation, debt management, transportation and insurance policy administration claims processing. The author has used pre-existing components in each of these projects and has seen practices, development approaches and tool utilization improve with each project. What follows is a set of lessons the author has learned over the years. The terms component and component-based development have become overloaded.