Speci cation Matching for Software Reuse : A Foundation

Using formal speciications to represent software components facilitates the determination of reusability because they more precisely characterize the functionality of the software, and the well-deened syntax makes processing amenable to automation. We present speciica-tion matching as a method for classiication, retrieval, and modiication of reusable components. A software component is speciied in terms of order-sorted predicate logic. For both components and methods, we consider not only exact match, but also relaxed match and logical match for performing speciication matching over a library of reusable software components.