Component-based software development is becoming more generalized, representing a considerable market for the software industry. However, several technical issues remain unsolved before the software components industry reaches the maturity as other software industries. Problems such as component selection and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components bring new challenges to the software engineering community. In contrast, software component certification is still immature and much research is needed in order to create well-defined standards for certification. This paper introduces a component quality model, based upon consistent and well-defined quality characteristics, and describes a formal case study that was used in order to analyze the viability of the model usage.