A Formal Approach to Reusing More General Components

Using formal speciications to represent software components facilitates the determination of reusability because they more precisely characterize the func-tionality of the software, and the well-deened syntax makes processing amenable to automation. This paper presents an approach, based on formal methods, to the modiication of reusable software components. From a two-tiered hierarchy of reusable software components, the existing components that are more general than the query speciication are retrieved from the hierarchy. The speciication for a more general retrieved component is compared to the query speciication to determine what changes need to be applied to the corresponding program component in order to make it satisfy the query speciication. This paper also describes an approach for assisting in the modiication of more general components and gives an example to demonstrate its use.