Top-Down Analysis for Bottom-Up Development

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is the construction of software systems from software components. Software components are independently deployable units of executable code that can be assembled into a system based on their externally visible properties, which are made available to system developers via the components interface specifications. Software components provide a means for large-scale reuse of intellectual property as well as coding, testing, and analysis effort. Benefits expected from developing an industry in CBSE include: reduced system development and maintenance costs, reduced time-to-market, and the availability of a marketplace of components that are bought and sold in massive quantities much like any other product. Component-based systems are constructed from a blend of locally developed and commercially available pieces enabling incremental development of complex systems. However, the full potential for software component reuse and a component marketplace can only be realized if tools and techniques are available to support the development and maintenance of these systems [2]. In this paper we address the specific problem of creating analytic assets, i.e. assets that summarize information about components that is required for compositional analysis. As a first step toward being able to create the analytic assets needed for component-based systems, we describe our in identifying and packaging analytic assets for program procedures for use in compositional program analysis.