Comments from the Microsoft TAB Meeting
“Components don’t work in software either”
- Components only work if in a common family: testing of cross-products (e.g. visual basic)
- Alternately, they need to have very simple and very standard I/O relationships (e.g. Unix pipes-character streams)
- Or they need to be “large chunks of funtionality” (e.g. Oracle database)
“The specification has to be much ‘smaller’ than the code”
The ratio of glue required to size of component is also a critical issue
Big issue is the testing/verification of the combinations