Large-Scale, Component-Based Development

10.1. Introduction

The Internet age has brought with it a number of new challenges in the way we design, build, and evolve the software that drives this revolution. The key driver for this is exploiting new business opportunities. These opportunities drive requirements for software design processes to enable the development of software-intensive applications that:

• Can be developed quickly to meet time-to-market demands;

• Support the ability to deal with highly varied kinds and quantities of access to data;

• Exhibit the flexibility to allow frequent changes as the environments in which the applications operate evolve.

Experiences from building distributed systems over the past decade lead to the conclusion that the only way to achieve these goals ...