A formal approach to specifying and testing the interoperation between components

ABSTRACT

Component-based development (CBD) has gained in popularity in recent years due to its promise of building applications from reusable and plug-and-playable software components. An ultimate goal of CBD is making plug-and-playable software development not only feasible, but also easy. In order to achieve this goal, techniques for clearly specifying functionality of components and for determining the degree to which two components can interoperate are needed. In this paper, we briefly review the ICM (Interoperable Component Model), and enhance the model by adding a formalism and providing a testing framework based on the formal specification. Each component is accompanied with an interface that describes the component's type and behavior. The component interactions are specified in message protocols. With the specification model, we will define the behavior type conformance rules on components.

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