Abstract

With the increasing use of software components, the methods for safe replacement of currently used components by newer versions will become of greater importance. While component specification and application composition issues have been researched, working approaches to assess compatibility of different components are hard to find. In this paper we define compatibility at two levels, of which contextual compatibility takes into account the actual usage of the component as bound in an assembled application. The presented method for determining compatibility of two components uses analysis of di#erences in their specifications structured into traits of related declarations.

Citations