Crossing the boundaries while analyzing heterogeneous component-based software systems

One way to manage the complexity of software systems is to compose them from reusable components, instead of starting from scratch. Components may be implemented in different programming languages and are tied together using configuration files, or glue code, defining instantiation, initialization and interconnections. Although correctly engineering the composition and configuration of components is crucial for the overall behavior, there is surprisingly little support for incorporating this information in the static verification and validation of these systems. Analyzing the properties of programs within closed code boundaries has been studied for some decades and is well-established. This paper contributes a method to support analysis across the components of a component-based system. We build upon the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel to reverse engineer homogeneous models for systems composed of heterogeneous artifacts. Our method is implemented in a prototype tool that has been successfully used to track information flow across the components of a component-based system using program slicing.