SPARTACAS- Automating Component Adaptation for Reuse

A mounting challenge for software designers is to nd eÆcient and cost-eective implementations for large and complex software problems. Many see software reuse as an intuitive approach, however the cost of reuse tends to outweigh the potential benets. The costs of software reuse include establishing and maintaining a library of reusable components, searching for applicable components to be reused in a design, as well as adapting components toward a solution. This thesis introduces SPARTACAS, a framework for automating specication-based component retrieval and adaptation. Using specications, instead of implementations, allows automated theorem-provers to formally verify logical relationships between components and problems. Logical relationships are used to evaluate the feasibility of reusing the implementations of components to implement a problem. Retrieving a component that is a complete match to a problem is rare, it is more common to retrieve a component that partially satises the requirements of a problem. Such components have to be adapted. Rather than adapting components at the code level, SPARTACAS adapts the behavior of partial matches by imposing interactions with other components in an architecture. Based on the unsatised constraints of the problem, a sub-problem is synthesized that specie