REUSING ANALOGOUS COMPONENTS

Using formal specifications to represent software components facilitat es the determination of reusability because they more precisely charac terize the functionality of the software, and the well-defined syntax makes processing amenable to automation. This paper presents an approa ch, based on formal methods, to the search, retrieval, and modificatio n of reusable software components. From a two-tiered hierarchy of reus able software components, the existing components that are analogous t o the query specification are retrieved from the hierarchy. The specif ication for an analogous retrieved component is compared to the query specification to determine what changes need to be applied to the corr esponding program component in order to make it satisfy the query spec ification.