Attaching Behavioral Contracts to Binary Components for Supporting Reliable Reuse*

Component contract, as an interface specification, is a good idea for improving software quality. This paper describes the technique of dynamically attaching behavioral contracts a posteriori to binary component with no explicit contracts discipline, and presents a model based on the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) to organize component contracts in the form of metadata and to perform efficient runtime verification. Our solution also gives a common understanding of behavioral contracts in composition even if the binary component is originally written in different programming languages. The added contract information, being easily retrieved, has a separate representation that provides flexibility, and results in raised binary component dependability and correctness on reuse and composition phase..