The B Method and the Component-Based Approach

The aim of this paper is to merge two approaches of software development: the component approach and the formal development approach. Developping software components is now a technique widely used by the software industry. These two approaches are not so distant if we consider Bertrand Meyer’s opinion: it is more complicated to reuse a component without contracts. One of the difficulties with the design by contract approach is to find the contracts. This difficulty can be removed by the use of the B method. In the B method, the software properties (the contracts) are expressed in the specifications. We present in this paper an approach to generate code in the spirit of the component approach from B specifications.