7.2. The CBD Life Cycle

A broad development life cycle provides the framework within which a component-based approach is applied. This framework ties together the major activities that take an application from its inception in terms of business needs to its conclusion following retirement of the software after some period of deployment and maintenance. In many respects this framework of activities is not specific to a CBD approach. Rather, it emphasizes traditional best practices in terms of requirements management, design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance [5].

Consequently, many of the best practices used in traditional software development approaches are equally applicable to a CBD life cycle. For example, a CBD project is more likely to succeed by applying the ideas of incremental development and release, strong project management, and emphasizing the importance of testing and quality assurance. However, in some cases, the general software development life cycle has been specialized with the needs of a component-based solution in mind. We illustrate this by examining two prominent commercially supported CBD life cycle approaches: the Rational Unified Process, and Sterling Software's Enterprise CBD. These approaches offer routes throughout the software development process specifically targeted at component modeling and implementation techniques.