Slicing of Component Behavior Specification with Respect to Their Composition

Being an important means of reducing development costs, behavior specification of software components facilitates reuse of a component and even reuse of a component’s architecture (assembly). However, since typically only a part of the components’ functionality is actually used in the new context, a significant part of the behavior specification may be superfluous. As a result, it may be hard to see (and filter out) the actual interplay among the components in their behavior specification. This paper targets the problem in the scope of behavior protocols. It presents a technique for slicing behavior protocols with respect to a given context (composition), designed to remove the unused behavior from a behavior specification.