Towards contract-based approach for quality-driven Service Component Architecture

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a recent approach and an industry standard for developing complex and distributed systems. Despite the growing research work it still lacks a formal basis for handling trust and reliability of quality-driven systems. In this paper we present main techniques and models for assuring quality and trustworthiness of component-based systems in general, and then we present and justify the choice of the design by contract approach that we adopted for the following of our research about SCA-based systems. Design by Contract is an approach of software design that aims to address reliability and quality issues in software development by expressing a set of its properties and constraints.