Verifying component and connector models against crosscutting structural views

Abstract

The structure of component and connector (C&C) models, which are used in many application domains of software engineering, consists of components at different containment levels, their typed input and output ports, and the connectors between them. C&C views, presented in [24], can be used to specify structural properties of C&C models in an expressive and intuitive way.In this work we address the verification of a C&C model against a C&C view and present efficient (polynomial) algorithms to decide satisfaction. A unique feature of our work, not present in existing approaches to checking structural properties of C&C models, is the generation of witnesses for satisfaction/non-satisfaction and of short naturallanguage texts, which serve to explain and formally justify the verification results and point the engineer to its causes.A prototype tool and an evaluation over four example systems with multiple views, performance and scalability experiments, as well as a user study of the usefulness of the witnesses for engineers, demonstrate the contribution of our work to the state-of-the-art in component and connector modeling and analysis.

Component and Connector Views in Practice: An Experience Report

“…Fig. 1 C&C view verification, as presented in [17], gets as input a C&C model and a C&C view. Besides the Boolean answer whether the C&C model satisfies the C&C view, the verification tool produces a minimal satisfaction or one or more non-satisfaction witnesses.…”

“…A negative non-satisfaction witness contains a minimal subset of the C&C model and a naturallanguage text, which together explain the reason for nonsatisfaction. These witnesses are divided into five categories: MissingComponent, HierarchyMismatch, InterfaceMismatch, MissingConnection, MissingEffector (see [17]). …”

“…The views allow engineers to specify constraints on hierarchy and connectivity, using partial examples, while crosscutting the implementation-oriented system/subsystem hierarchy of the target model. The verification problem of checking a C&C model against a view was investigated in [17]. The synthesis problem of automatically generating a C&C model satisfying a given C&C views specification, if one exists, was studied in [16].…”

Why is My Component and Connector Views Specification Unsatisfiable?

“…In [14] we considered the verification problem of checking whether a C&C model satisfies a given C&C view. We generated short natural-language texts that explained the reasons for 1 A core of only a single unsatisfiable view may occur in advanced style specifications that add restrictions on the component hierarchy (see Sect.…”

“…The views allow engineers to specify constraints on hierarchy and connectivity, using partial examples, while crosscutting the implementation-oriented system/sub-system hierarchy of the target model. The verification problem of checking a C&C model against a view was investigated in [14]. The synthesis problem of automatically generating a C&C model satisfying a given views specification, if one exists, was studied in [13].…”