Strong dependencies between software components

Component-based systems often describe context requirements in terms of explicit inter-component dependencies. Studying large instances of such systems - such as free and open source software (FOSS) distributions - in terms of declared dependencies between packages is appealing. It is however also m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement pp. 89 - 99
Main Authors Abate, P., Di Cosmo, R., Boender, J., Zacchiroli, S.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2009
Subjects
Application software
Encoding
Internet
Open source software
Packaging
Postal services
Quality assurance
Software engineering
Software measurement
Software packages
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Summary:Component-based systems often describe context requirements in terms of explicit inter-component dependencies. Studying large instances of such systems - such as free and open source software (FOSS) distributions - in terms of declared dependencies between packages is appealing. It is however also misleading when the language to express dependencies is as expressive as Boolean formulae, which is often the case. In such settings, a more appropriate notion of component dependency exists: strong dependency. This paper introduces such notion as a first step towards modeling semantic, rather then syntactic, inter-component relationships. Furthermore, a notion of component sensitivity is derived from strong dependencies, with applications to quality assurance and to the evaluation of upgrade risks. An empirical study of strong dependencies and sensitivity is presented, in the context of one of the largest, freely available, component-based system.
ISBN:1424448425
9781424448425
ISSN:1949-3770
1949-3789
DOI:10.1109/ESEM.2009.5316017