Component composition errors and update atomicity: static analysis: Research Articles

  • Authors:

  • J. Adamek;F. Plasil

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Malostranské námesti 25, 118 00 Prague, Czech Republic;Dept. of Softw. Eng., Fac. of Math. and Phys., Charles Univ., Malostranské námesti 25 and Acad. of Sci. of the Czech Rep., Inst. of Comp. Sci., Prague, Czech Republic

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Unanticipated Software Evolution
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Dynamic evolution inherently involves dynamic update and the issue of its atomicity. We show how this issue can be addressed in a similar manner to a communication failure via an extension to behavior protocols. First, we discuss the problem of defining a composition operator for behavior protocols so as to be able to reflect communication failures. Classical architecture description languages (ADLs) supporting behavior description, such as Wright and TRACTA, use a CSP-like parallel composition, which inherently yields only ‘successful traces’ ignoring non-accepted communication attempts. We show that component composition can produce several different types of behavior errors: bad activity, no activity, and divergence. The key idea behind bad activity is that real programs typically have an asymmetry of roles during event exchange: the caller is considered to be the initiator of the call while the callee has only a passive role. This contrasts with most formal systems, which treat communication symmetrically. We propose a new composition operator, ‘consent’, which reflects these types of errors by producing erroneous traces. By using the consent operator it can be statically determined whether the atomicity of a dynamic update of a component is implicitly guaranteed by the behavior of its current environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.