This paper addresses the problem of identifying incompatibilities between two programs that operate in a producer/consumer relationship. It describes the techniques that are incorporated in a tool called PCCA (Producer-Consumer Conformance Analyzer), which attempts to (i) determine whether the consumer is prepared to accept all messages that the producer can emit, or (ii) find a counterexample: a message that the producer can emit and the consumer will reject. 1.

Component-based development is a well-established methodology of software development. Nevertheless, some of the benefits that the component based development offers are often neglected. One of them is modeling and subsequent analysis of component behavior, which can help establish correctness guarantees, such as absence of composition errors and safety of component updates. We believe that application of component behavior modeling in practice is limited due to huge differences between the behavior modeling languages (e.g., process algebras) and the common implementation languages (e.g., Java). As a result, many concepts of the implementation languages are either very different or completely missing in the behavior modeling languages. As an example, even though behavior modeling languages are practical for modeling and analysis of various message-based protocols, they are not well suited for modeling current component applications, where thread-based parallelism, lock-based synchronization, and nested method calls are the essential building blocks. With this in mind, we propose a new behavior modeling language for software components, Threaded Behavior Protocols (TBP). At the model level, TBP provides developers with the concepts known from the implementation languages and essential to most component applications. In addition, the theoretical framework of TBP provides a notion of correctness based on absence of communication errors and a refinement

This paper addresses the problem of identifying incompatibilities between two programs that operate in a producer/consumer relationship. It describes the techniques that are incorporated in a tool called PCCA (Producer-Consumer Conformance Analyzer), which attempts to (i) determine whether the consumer is prepared to accept all messages that the producer can emit, or (ii) find a counterexample: a message that the producer can emit and the consumer considers ill-formed.