The new trend is to move from the traditional software development approach, which focuses on building software systems from scratch, to component based software development approach, which revolutionizes how software systems are built. The focus of this new approach is on development of new systems, by selecting and assembling a set of off the shelf components within an appropriate software architecture. On one hand, the use of off the shelf components has led to a great potential for: (1) significantly reducing cost and time to market of large scale and complex software systems; (2) improving system maintainability and flexibility by allowing new components to replace old ones; and (3) enhancing system quality by allowing components to be developed by those who are specialized in the application area and systems to be built by software engineers who are specialized in component based software development. On the other hand, the use of commercial off the shelf software-delivered as black box components-has raised a few major technical and non technical issues. The paper explores those issues, and discusses several directions for future research that would help to expand the use of component based software development approach.