Verifying contracts among software components: An ontology-based approach

Context: The goal of Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is the development of software systems in terms of an assembly of pre-fabricated software components. One of the main aims of CBSE is to increase software reuse whereby a software component becomes part of different software systems. Verification is an important task that ensures contract conformance among components. However, current techniques for verification of component matching are poorly used in industry due to the fact that the use of these techniques is complex since they require specialized expertise. Also, the use of such techniques can be time-consuming. Objective: In this paper, we present Moctezuma, a framework for verifying the matching of software components that does not require the user possessing highly specialized skills and is able to check contract conformance of functional semantics aspects.Method: Our approach relies on a core ontology of software components, which captures the concepts, properties, relationships, requirements, and software component functionality. We make use of architecture description languages (ADLs) to specify configurations of component interconnections. Interface contracts are specified with a customized version of CORBA-IDL. We employ ontology reasoning engines to check conformance among interface contracts.Results: The accuracy evaluation results have shown that our verifier has a high accuracy for detecting semantics errors. The scalability evaluation shows that our framework exhibits almost a linear behavior. Conclusions: It is concluded that our framework is suitable for verifying the conformance of interface contracts, involving semantics aspects, along a configuration of component interconnections.