COTS Integration Mismatch Resolution - The Framework

As software systems become increasingly complex and expensive to build, software engineers are challenged with various options to meet these challenges by turning towards pre-build software components known as Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software. COTS software are usually acquired as binary components, and sometimes their behavior is poorly specified. One of the major challenges faced by software engineers when developing systems by integrating COTS is guaranteeing that the components correctly integrate with each other. In particular, to ensure the interaction behavior of these components and the assumptions they make about the interaction behavior within the external context in which they expects to operate. This paper introduces a framework for semi-automatically developing adaptors to resolve signature and protocol mismatches that may occur during COTS integration by unifying various threads of research including byte-code engineering, black-box test case generation, protocol discovery, mismatch patterns and adaptor generation.