Non-functional Specifications of Components and Systems: a Generic Semantic Framework and Its Applications

Component-Based Software Engineering is considered one solution for the problem of growing complexity and size of modern software systems. Applications are not built in a monolithic fashion from scratch, but are rather assembled from components; that is, pre-constructed units of software. The properties of such software components must be specified explicitly. This has been well understood for functional properties, but non-functional properties are still an area of ongoing research. In particular, generic approaches that use the same formalism for arbitrary non-functional properties and thus reduce the cognitive load for application developers are still not sufficiently understood. The book introduces a formal framework for a generic approach for specifying non-functional properties of component-based systems. The framework is then applied to defining the semantics of a specification language and to specifying analysis methods for specific non-functional properties. The book comes with an extensive appendix of a number of sample specifications for concrete properties and applications. It targets researchers and software engineers interested in CBSE and non-functional properties.