5.3. The Importance of Component Specification
From the earlier discussion of components, the importance of describing component behavior in some meaningful way is seen to be essential. The main dilemma that arises is how to describe this behavior in a way that is sufficiently precise, yet easy and intuitive for software engineers to develop and understand. To achieve this, both the implementation and the specification may be described in source code or text. The usual form of component behavior description may consist of some or all of the following:
a list of operation names and signatures defining the input and output parameters for each operation;
an informal textual description of the component's functionality, intended usage scenarios, ...
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