A formal approach to reusing more general components

Using formal specifications to represent software components facilitates tire determination of reusability because they more precisely characterize the functionality of the software, and the well-defined syntax makes processing amenable to automation. This paper presents an approach, based on formal methods, to the modification of reusable software components. From a two-tiered hierarchy of reusable software components, the existing components that are more general than the query specification are retrieved from the hierarchy. The specification for a more general retrieved component is compared to the query specification to determine what changes need to be applied to the corresponding program component in order to make it satisfy the query specification. This paper also describes an approach for assisting in the modification of more general components and gives an example to demonstrate its use