Assessing important factors that support component‐based development in developing countries

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kunda, Douglas | Brooks, Laurence

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK

Note: [] Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1904 432737; Fax: 44 1904 432767; E‐mail: douglas@cs.york.ac.uk.

Abstract: Most developing countries (DCs) have yet to fully benefit from the many advances in the information technology (IT) field because of specific problems experienced by these countries. Examples include a lack of systems infrastructure and resources to invest in IT. Component‐Based Development (CBD) offers a number of benefits that the DCs can tap into, such as reducing development and maintenance costs and improving reuse across projects. CBD entail purchasing a number of off‐the‐shelf software components, each satisfying some part of the requirements of the system and integrating these components into the required system. This paper will discuss the findings of a survey conducted in a specific developing country (Zambia) to assess important factors that support the CBD process. The results suggests that, although CBD has great potential for DCs there are some social and technical factors that need to be addressed by organisations in DCs for this to be fully realised. For example, the results show that from the social point of view there is lack of management support for CBD and from the technical point of view that organisations were not familiar with the technology for integrating components.

Journal: Information Technology for Development, vol. 9, no. 3-4, pp. 123-139, 2000