Assessing component’s behavioral interoperability concerning goals

Abstract

As reuse of components becomes increasingly important, so does the assessment of interoperability between them at the time of component assembly. In order for the assembled components to work appropriately according to the needs of the intended stakeholders, it is essential to clearly understand what the individual source components were intended for in the first place. However, research on component interoperability in the past by and large has been focused more on the structural similarities and behavioral interactions between architectural artifacts or between low-level library routines. In this paper, we present an approach to assessing components' behavioral interoperability, with the consideration of the stakeholders' goals which the source components were intended to help achieve. More specifically, we present rules for translating descriptions of stakeholders' goals, together with operations of components and their interactions, into declarative specifications, which are amenable to automatic analysis or automatic generation of visual displays of their execution model. This analysis and visual example will help assess whether the behavior of the assembled components helps, or hurts, the goals of the stakeholders of such assembled components. A Home Appliance Control System is used as a running example to illustrate the approach.