ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM: Component-Based Software

One of the many paradoxes of the Information Age is that software‹ the essence of the automated systems that move and process information. manage factories, maintain complex accounting and record-keeping systems‹is produced by something much like 19th-century handcrafted products. Shrink-wrapped commodity software for personal computers accounts for about 15 percent of the market: the balance is made up of large. custom systems for such things as financial services. manufacturing, or chemical processing. These systems are custom-built monoliths. produced one at a time at costs of up to tens of millions of dollars. The failure rate for developing these systems‹projects that are started but never become fully operational‹is reported to be about 70 percent.

The Advanced Technology Program focused on Component-Based Software launches a five-year cooperative effort with U.S.. software producers to change this. Drawing on research in automated software design and production, the program will seek to establish the technology foundation to enable fundamental changes in the software industry. in the long term, this program envisions that vendors would be able to develop and market small, broadly useful software components described by a formal specification that characterizes the logical and functional requirements and characteristics of each component. Buyers in turn would be able to use similar formal specifications to characterize desired applications, and automated systems would match components with applications. reconfiguring the components as necessary to mesh with the final system. Conceptually, this is like marketing a light bulb that is automatically configured at the point of use to fit in whatever socket is there, at whatever voltage is present. As a result, software producers would be able to shift their emphasis from the mechanics of the software development process to the more important task of meeting application needs by using automated tools to ,assemble and integrate independently produced components bought from specialized software component vendors.

While the United States clearly dominates the world software market today, foreign competition is growing steadily, particularly in the custom systems market directly addressed by this program. Moreover the combination of lower cost, higher dependability, the ability to commercially address custom markets, and increased industry capacity should lead to greatly expanded markets for U.S.-produced software both at home and abroad.

The immediate business goals of the ATP program in Component Basecl software include enabling markedly increased productivity in software development through improved quality and reliability. reduced development time. and systematic reuse of components: enabling increased productivity-ity for the users of major software systems through increased quality and dependability of systems built on reusable components; and extending the potential markets for ~.S. U.S. software producers. This should enable software producers to concentrate on areas of specialization. bringing dramatic improvements in the quality and dependability of software-are, and expanding markets both at home and abroad for U.S.. software. The success of this program should have a major impact in making it easier to produce the highly complex. integrated systems envisioned for the National Information Infrastructure.

Department of Commerce-Technology Administration-National Institute of Standards and Technology: April 1994

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