Automatic failures-free connector synthesis: An example

Many software projects are based on the integration of independently designed software components that are acquired on the market rather than developed within the project itself. This type of components is well known as COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components. Nowadays component based technologies provide interoperability and composition mechanisms that cannot solve the COTS components assembly problem in an automatic way. One of the main problems in components assembly is related to the ability to establish properties on the assembly code by only assuming a limited knowledge of the single components properties. Our answer to this problem is a software architecture based approach in which the software architecture imposed on the assembly, allows for detection and recovery of COTS integration anomalies. We build applications by assuming a defined architectural style. Then, we compose a system in such a way that it is possible to check whether and why the system presents some software anomalies (e.g.: deadlock, livelock). Depending on the kind of failures a recovery policy which can avoid the anomalies and obtain a correct assembly can be performed. A tool can then synthesize the assembly code (as a failures-free connector component) to glue together a set of COTS components. This glue code must be synthesized in such a way that (a well defined set of) functional properties required for the composed system are automatically guaranteed. In the paper we briefly describe our approach and then we present its application to an example.