IDMS: A System to Verify Component Interface Completeness and Compatibility for Product Integration

The growing approach of Component-Based software Development has had a great impact on today system architectural design. However, the design of subsystems that lacks interoperability and reusability can cause problems during product integration. At worst, this may result in project failure. In literature, it is suggested that the verification of interface descriptions and management of interface changes are factors essential to the success of product integration process. This paper thus presents an automation approach to facilitate reviewing component interfaces for completeness and compatibility. The Interface Descriptions Management System (IDMS) has been implemented to ease and fasten the interface review activities using UML component diagrams as input. The method of verifying interface compatibility is accomplished by traversing the component dependency graph called Component Compatibility Graph (CCG). CCG is the visualization of which each node represents a component, and each edge represents communications between associated components. Three case studies were studied to subjectively evaluate the correctness and usefulness of IDMS.