Software packaging approaches - A comparison framework

Effective software modularity brings many benefits such as long-term cost reduction, architecture stability, design flexibility, high maintainability, and high reusability. A module could be a class, a package, a component, or a subsystem. In this paper, we are concerned with the package type of modules. There has been a number of attempts to propose approaches for automatic packaging of classes in OO development. However, there is no framework that could be used to aid practitioners in selecting appropriate approaches suitable for their particular development efforts. In this paper we present an attribute-based framework to classify and compare these approaches and provide such aid to practitioners. The framework is also meant to guide researchers interested in proposing new packaging approaches. The paper discusses a number of representative packaging approaches against the framework. Analysis of the discussion suggests open points for future research.