A new modeling method of component interaction behavior

The behavioral semantics of component interfaces plays a significant role in the reuse, integration, validation and maintenance of components. However, the interface description specification of COTS component usually only contains syntax information, and lacks behavioral semantics information. This paper presents a method, called EKBehavior, for incrementally inferring a behavior model that represents the interplay between variable values and method invocations. EKBehavior extends the KBehavior algorithm for extracting finite state automata from execution traces, to the case of finite state automata with parameters. Popular dynamic analysis techniques synthesize either information on the values of the variables or information on relations between invocations of methods. Thus, these approaches do not capture the important relations that exist between data values and invocation sequences. Compared with the existing techniques, method generates model that represents the sequence constraints of invocations of methods, constraints of variable values, and the relations between variable values and method invocations.