Component-based development traditionally recognizes two parallel views (system-level view and component-level view), which correspond to two major concerns - development of a an application and development of a reusable component for the use in application development. By having different objectives, these views have relatively disparate notion of a component, which consequently means that they are difficult (yet necessary) to combine.
In this paper, we propose a method (named CoDIT), which spans the gap between the two views by providing a synchronisation between system-level view (expressed in UML 2) and component-level view. For component-level view, the method supports component frameworks with method-call as the communication style.
The variability in the composition mechanisms of the component frameworks is addressed by using principles of meta-component systems. The benefits of the proposed method are evaluated on a real-life case study (in SOFA 2) together with measurements of development efforts.