Adaptation of Black-Box Software Components

Abstract

The globalization of the software market leads to crucial problems for software companies. More competition between software companies arises and leads to the force on companies to develop ever newer software products in ever shortened time interval. Therefore the time to market for software systems is shortened and obviously the product life cycle is shortened too. Thus software companies shortened the time interval for research and development. Due to the fact of competition between software companies software products have to develop low-priced and this leads to a smaller return on investment. A big challenge for software companies is the use of an effective research and development process to have these problems under control. A way to control these problems can be the reuse of existing software components and adapt those software components to new functionality or accommodate mismatched interfaces. Complete redevelopment of software products is more expensive and time consuming than to develop software components. The approach introduced here presents novel technique together with a supportive environment that enables developers to cope with the adaptability of black-box software components. A supportive environment will be designed that checks the compatibility of black-box software components with the assistance of their specifications. Generated adapter software components can take over the part of adaptation and advance the functionality. Besides, a pool of software components can be used to compose an application to satisfy customer needs. Certainly this pool of software components consists of black-box software components and adapter software components which can be connected on demand.