Compatibility test for coordination aspects of software components

Abstract

Combining third party software components to customer-individual application systems requires first, standardized specification techniques for describing the technical as well as the business-related aspects of the services provided and required by the corresponding software components and second, automated compatibility tests in order to identify components fulfilling demands specified by component requestors. Adequate techniques for the specification of component services are consolidated in a multilayered specification framework, where formal notations are preferred in order to enable the execution of automated compatibility tests. These tests are a prerequisite for the existence of component markets where third party software components are traded and components that fulfil the specified demands are identified. This paper presents an algorithm for the layer of the specification framework where coordination aspects of a software component are described. On this layer an extension of the object constraint language (OCL) by temporal operators is used to specify the succession relationships between the services of related software components. Thereby the connections to other layers are tagged and existing tests are integrated.