Towards a Component Concept for Continuous Software Engineering

This paper will sketch the preliminary ideas for the component concept which are to be proven and investigated further within the research project "Continuous Software Engineering: Continuous Engineering for Evolutionary Information- and Communication Infrastructures". This paper is a position paper of the working group "Components" within the sub-porject "Conceptual Basis for Continous Software Engineering" and focuses on research tasks to be undertaken within the project. The component concept aimed for should serve as a basis for supporting continuous software engineering as described by the different scenarios of migration, reconfiguration and product lines development [CSE 99]. First, we will define components and a general scheme for describing them. Next, we will discuss how to compose components. The complexity of a component is managed by views which we employ to represent each part of a component from different point of views using adequate descript ion languages.