Software engineering - components, interfaces, behaviours

Summary form only given. Software engineering has matured from heuristic practice to an engineering discipline. Over the years, software technology developed into a key qualification for mastering complex technical systems. Nowadays, software engineers can benefit from a solid stock of basic research addressing the specification, modelling, design and implementation of sequential, concurrent, distributed and real time systems. This paper surveys the scientific foundations of modern software technology concentrating on components, interfaces and behaviours. We present a unifying approach relating different system views manifesting themselves as data model, communication model, state transition model, and process model.