A Methodological Approach to Choose Components in Development and Evolution Processes

One of Software Engineering's main goals is to build complex applications in a simple way. For that, software components must be described by their functional and non-functional properties. Then, the problem is to know which component satisfies a specific need in a specific composition context, during software development or evolution. We claim that this is a problem of substitution, and we propose a need-aware substitution model that takes into account functional and non-functional properties.