Using Graph Rewrite Systems for supporting the Software Design Process by finding suitable.pdfVIP

Using Graph Rewrite Systems for supporting the Software Design Process by finding suitable Software Components Bettina Sucrow and Torsten Heverhagen Data Management Systems and Knowledge Representation, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Essen, Germany {sucrow | the}@informatik.uni-essen.de ABSTRACT Software engineers have to decide permanently during the software design process whether to spec- ify every necessary software portion of the system to be designed entirely themselves or, rather, to search for and possibly substitute a corresponding suitable software portion already existing and functioning well. Our approach investigates the latter possibility in the following sense: if we presume that software engineers specify their software components in a similar way then it should be possible to compare only abstractly specified components with already concretely specified ones with the goal of substi- tuting the former by the latter, respectively, rather than specifying the whole system in every detail. However, such an approach has only a chance to really work correctly if it is possible to describe a software design process of such a kind by a method offering an intuitive understanding, a formal basis and even, finally, a practical result. Our idea is to use graph rewrite systems for this purpose. 1 Introduction Software engineers have to decide permanently during the software design process whether to specify every nec- essary software portion of the system to be designed entirely themselves or, rather, to search for and possibly sub- stitute a corresponding suitable software portion already existing and functioning well. In this contribution we propose to support the software engineer during the software de