Specification of Business Components Using Temporal OCL

Abstract

Compositional, plug-and-play-like reuse of black box components requires sophisticated techniques to specify components, especially when combined with third party components that are traded on component markets to individual customer’s business application systems. As in established engineering disciplines, like mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, formal documentation of business components that become part of contractual agreements are needed. With this initial problem, we explain the general, layered structure of software contracts for business components and show shortcomings of common specification approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a formal notation for the specification of business components that extends the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and allows for a broader use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with respect to the layered structure of software contracts for business components.