Component Quality: The Great Debate

by Paul Allen

The debate about component quality is, to my mind, one of the most important on the current software agenda. It's a complex issue with many facets. Before we start, I'd like to take a step back and consider the impact of the quality issue on the more recent descendants of components: Web services. For some, Web services appear to offer an easy option or to somehow render the importance of components (and therefore component quality) redundant. It's important to understand that the advent of Web services puts the focus firmly on interfaces, decoupled from considerations of implementation, as an organization simply subscribes to a Web service, without the need to buy a copy of a component, install it, and integrate it. This feature obviously lends great freedom to the design process. At the same time, Web services -- far from being an escape route from the demands of quality -- actually raise the stakes for quality.