Frequently Occurring Patterns in Behavioral Specification of Software Components

Compositional plug-and-play-like reuse of black-box components requires sophisticated techniques to specify the components. One current problem in specifying behavioral aspects comes from the fact that editing OCL constraints manually is time consuming and error-prone. To simplify constraint definition we propose to use specification patterns for which OCL constraints can be generated automatically. As a first step we identify a list of patterns that frequently occur in behavioral specifications. These patterns are described in detail using a special description scheme and specification examples.