Towards conflict-free composition of non-functional concerns

Abstract

In component-based software development, applications are decomposed, e.g., into functional and non-functional components which have to be composed to a working system. The composition of non-functional behavior from different non-functional domains such as security, reliability, and performance is particularly complex. Finding a valid composition is challenging because there are different types of interdependencies between concerns, e.g. mutual exclusion, conflicts, and ordering restrictions, which should not be violated. In this paper we formalize a set of interdependency types between non-functional actions realizing non-functional behavior. These interdependencies can either be specified explicitly or implicitly by taking action properties into account. This rich set of interdependencies can then be used to ease the task of action composition by validating compositions against interdependency constraints, proposing conflict resolution strategies, and by applying our guided composition procedure. This procedure proposes next valid modeling steps leading to conflict-free compositions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.