Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities

The ability of reusing existing software has always been a major concern of Software Engineering. The reuse and integration of heterogeneous software parts is an issue for current paradigms such as Component-Based Software Development, or Coordination Models and Languages. However, a serious limitation of current approaches is that while they provide convenient ways to describe the typed signatures of software entities, they offer a quite limited support to describe their concurrent behaviour. As a consequence, when a component is going to be reused, one can only be sure that it provides the required interface, but nothing else can be inferred about the behaviour of the component with regard to the interaction protocol required by its environment. To deal with this problem, a new discipline, Software Adaptation, is emerging. Software Adaptation promotes the use of adaptors-specific computational entities guaranteeing that software components will interact in the right way not only at the signature level, but also at the protocol and semantic levels. This paper summarizes the results and conclusions of the First Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation Techniques for Software Entities (WCAT'04).