Verifying Component and Connector Models against Crosscutting Structural Views (extended abstract)

The structure of component and connector (C&C) models, which are used in many application domains of software engineering, consists of components at different containment levels, their typed input and output ports, and the connectors between them. C&C views, presented in [MRR13], can be used to specify structural properties of C&C models in an expressive and intuitive way. This extended abstract reports on [MRR14], where we addressed the verification of a C&C model against a C&C view and presented efficient (polynomial) algorithms to decide satisfaction. A unique feature of our work, not present in existing approaches to checking structural properties of C&C models, is the generation of witnesses for satisfaction/non-satisfaction and of short natural-language texts, which serve to explain and formally justify the verification results and point the engineer to its causes. A prototype tool and an evaluation over four example systems with multiple views, performance and scalability experiments, as well as a user study of the usefulness of the witnesses for engineers, demonstrate the contribution of our work to the state-of-the-art in component and connector modeling and analysis.