Rigorous Description Of Design Components Functionality: An Approach Based Contract

Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the characterization/specification of design components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To avoid mismatch and misuse of components, more comprehensive specification of software components is required, In this paper, we present a contract-based approach to analyze and model the both aspects (functional and nonfunctional) properties of design components and their composition in order to detect and correct composition errors. This approach permits to characterize the structural, interface and behavioural aspects of design component. To enable this we present a pattern contract language that captures the structural and behavioral requirements associated with a range of patterns, as well as the system properties that are guaranteed as a result. In addition, we propose the use of the LOTOS language as an ADL for formalizing these aspects. We illustrate the approach by applying it to a standard design pattern.