Automating component adaptation for reuse

Abstract

Reuse is a sound and practical design technique in many engineering disciplines. Although successful instances of software reuse are becoming more common, the cost of reuse tends to outweigh the potential benefits. The costs of software reuse include establishing and maintaining a library of reusable components, searching for applicable components to be reused, as well as adapting components toward a solution to a design problem. In this paper, we present a framework, called SPARTACAS, for automating specification-based component retrieval and adaptation. Components that partially satisfy the constraints of a design problem are adapted using adaptation architectures. Adaptation architectures modify the behavior of a software component by imposing interactions with other components. Based on the functionality specified in the problem and the partially-matched component, a sub-problem that specifies the missing functionality is synthesized. The sub-problem is used to query the library for components for adaptation. The framework was implemented and evaluated empirically, the results suggest that automated adaptation using architectures successfully promotes software reuse, and hierarchically organizes a solution to a design problem.