This is largely justified, and gratifying to those of us who have been advocating component-based development for many years. In fact they raise new questions too. This is going to be a painful realization. So the two-step reasoning cited at the beginning of this column omitted a crucial third step. The kind of breakthrough that we need can only be achieved through economies of scale resulting from reusing other people's creations.
Components are worthless, and quite possibly harmful, without an impeccable guarantee of quality.
Only recently has the problem of component quality come to the forefront, with the appearance of such articles as Elaine Weyuker's discussion, in the October 1998 issue of IEEE Software , of testing components. The analogy with electronic components helps us here too. For software components we are far behind. This truth has not yet reached the software community at large, but when it does it will be sobering. It would be a pity if the move to components were to falter because of insufficient attention paid to quality.