Contract-Based Approach to Analyze Software Components

Component-based software development focuses on building large software systems by integrating existing software components to reduce cost, risk and time. However, behavioural and compositional conflicts among components constitute a crucial barrier to successful software composition. In this paper, we present a contract-based approach to analyze and model the properties of components and their composition in order to detect and correct composition errors. With this approach we characterize the structural, interface and behavioural aspects, and a specific form of evolution of these components. Enabling this, we propose the use of the LOTOS language as an Architecture Description Language (ADL) for formalising these aspects.