This paper argues that quality attributes of a component are most often not a constant property. Much more, the quality of a component heavily depends on the specific usage context. Therefore, the authors present a specification method for contractually specified components which does not specify quality attributes as constants but as functions to be evaluated at deployment. The contribution of this paper is threefold; the authors clarify the term "Contractual use of components", a term which is often misstated or used inconsistently in current literature. The authors therefore translate the "Design-by-contract"-principle to components; it also generalises component contracts to parameterised contracts, taking the mentioned context-dependencies of components into account; the authors finally demonstrate how parameterised contracts are used to compute the reliability of software components.
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