Component Metadata for Software Engineering Tasks

This paper presents a framework that lets a component developer provide a component user with different kinds of information, depending on the specific context and needs. The framework is based on presenting this information in the form of metadata. Metadata describe static and dynamic aspects of the component, can be accessed by the user, and can be used for different tasks throughout the software engineering lifecycle. The framework is defined in a general way, so that the metadata can be easily extended if new types of data have to be provided. In our approach, we define a unique format and a unique tag for each kind of metadata provided. The tag lets the user of the component both treat the information provided as metadata in the correct way and query for a specific piece of information. We motivate the untapped potential of component metadata by showing the need for metadata in the context of testing and analysis of distributed component-based systems, and introduce our framework with the help of an example. We sketch a possible scenario consisting of an application developer who wants to perform two different software engineering tasks on her application: generating self-checking code and program slicing.