Preparing Software Components for Integration

Current industrial models for software components have made component based software engineering a practical reality. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of component interfaces primarily deals with syntactic issues. As such, component mismatch remains a critical stumbling block in component based software engineering: components may syntctically “plug”, but still not behaviourally “play”. To facilitate proper understanding and use of software components and advance towards full “plug-and-play”, richer interface specification is needed for components. In this paper, we present a framework for rich component interface specification. It address the following issues of component specification: functional capability (interface signature and semantics), proper use (interface configuration and interaction protocols), and usefulness (qualities).