Modeling Components and Component-Based Systems in KobrA

In this chapter we present a version of the Trading System case study modeled according to the KobrA approach. KobrA is a UML-based method for describing components and component-based systems developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering at the beginning of the decade. The acronym stands for the term “Komponenten basierte Anwendungsentwicklung” – German for “Component-based Application Development”. KobrA has been successfully used by a number of companies in industrial settings and has given rise to numerous specializations and offshoots (e.g. MARMOT [1] and MORABIT [2]). The original version of the method [3] was developed for the UML 1.x flavor of the UML, but in this chapter we introduce an updated version optimized for use with the 2.x versions of the UML [4] and its related standards such as OCL [5]. KobrA also provides support for other advanced software engineering approaches such as product-lines, but these are beyond the scope of this chapter. Here we focus on the component-modeling aspects of the method.