Summary
Component-based approaches work best when interfaces expose the right information: assumptions, guarantees, and constraints. This page keeps a practical view: how to reason about behaviour at boundaries and how to avoid accidental coupling.
Short notes
- Assume / guarantee framing When describing a component, separate what it requires from its environment (assumptions) from what it provides (guarantees). This makes composition failures much easier to diagnose.
- Boundary behaviour matters Most incidents occur at boundaries: timeouts, retries, partial failure, and ordering issues. Document these behaviours explicitly to prevent “hidden contracts”.
- Measurement is part of the model If performance is relevant, make measurement part of the engineering process: establish budgets and track tail behaviour. It’s easier to maintain a budget than to “optimise” indefinitely.
Reading pointers
A small set of starting points (general reference pages).
- Component-based software engineering High-level overview and terminology.
- Design by contract Assumptions/guarantees framing.