Component compatibility in terms of extra-functional properties: technical report no. DCSE/TR-2010-06

Architectures based on composing target application functionality from pre-existing components have been successfully used in many projects, yet there are several aspects in which they fail to reach the desirable level of maturity. Since different vendors may provide components with the same functionality, extra-functional properties must be taken into account to select the component which suits the nal system. This report addresses the problem of inadequate means to de ne extra-functional. We first provide a survey of the state of the art. We second propose a formalism based on existing approaches which addresse this inadequacy and targets at context dependency of properties. Furthermore we discuse possible directions of future work. The further aim is to evaluate extra- functional properties attached to chains of components into resulting properties representing abilities of the whole system