Long-Term Software Architecture Management with Multi-technology Tool Support

A major cause of many complications in the field of software architectures is the lack of appropriate abstractions for separating, combining and encapsulating concerns of various kinds in architectural descriptions. Architectures of most complex software-intensive systems involve concerns that inherently crosscut the natural boundaries of the elements composing the architecture descriptions. Crosscutting concerns intersect the common modularity of systems as prescribed by their architecture descriptions, by traversing both the components and connectors, i.e., the relationships among the components. Crosscutting concerns are critical aspects of many architectural problems. However, architectural descriptions written in special-purpose languages (ADLs) like Wright, Darwin, Rapide and Acme should support descriptions of multiple structures, which include diagrams, models and views, that intentionally address different kinds of concerns. ADLs should show how various concerns affect each other in architectural designs; they should also allow one to identify, analyze and elaborate architectural concerns that cut across several software components, such as transactions, security, load balancing, synchronization, reuse, customization, scalability, etc.; they should, but they do not. This dissertation presents a new approach to software architecture that is suitable for supporting concern-oriented development and documentation of architectures for software-intensive systems. This approach allows for creating and documenting a multidimensional software structure that is referred to as concern-oriented software architecture; it provides new mechanisms for encapsulating individual concerns into independent architectural constructs. The ultimate goal of this new approach is to provide support for achieving design by concerns all through the development and description of software architectures. Moving towards this goal, we present a particular concern-oriented architectural framework called Perspectival Concern-Spaces (PCS). The PCS Framework offers a flexible and extensible means a) for supporting advanced separation of concerns in architectural design, and in the construction and evolution of software-intensive systems; and b) for filling the gap between architectural descriptions and modern software development artifacts. To show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we provide new modeling techniques that are used to describe and apply an aspect-oriented architectural pattern, called the On-demand Remodularization pattern. We give several examples of how the PCS Framework can be used to integrate concern-oriented architectural documentations with mainstream software development artifacts.

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

This paper provides an introduction to the field of software engineering requires facility in architectural software design. The goal is to demonstrate the current state of the discipline and examine the ways in which architectural design can impact soft-ware design. Software architecture is used to describe a high level design methodology of large software systems. It provides the overall structure of a system in an abstract and structured fashion. A smart architectural demonstration holds the key to the effectiveness of a software architecture description and usage. This paper focuses on criterion to select appropriate architecture style for software system. It also gives overview of definition, goals and requirements of software architecture with various architecture styles, their benefits and applications. The authors have also described the requirements and goals of robotic software architecture. The proposal for layered robotic software architecture for a distributed system is also presented.

With the growing use of UML diagrams for software architecture description and the importance of non-functional requirements evaluation at software architecture level, filling the scientific gap between architect and requirement analyst is considered to be significant. Software architects are not usually familiar with non-functional requirement analysis and are not able to analyze such requirements easily. On the other hand, non-functional requirements cannot be evaluated directly by UML diagrams. Therefore, the architect should annotate additional information of the nonfunctional requirements to software architecture description and then an executable model can be produced. These executable models can be petri nets, queuing networks, stochastic process algebra and etc. One kind of the UML diagrams that can be used to describe software architecture is component diagram. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that enables an architect to transform a component diagram into an executable model based on different extensions of petri nets. Moreover, we show how to use this petri net model for performance evaluation and simulation and the implications of this transformation are described completely. Finally, to represent the usage of our proposed algorithm, we consider a case study as an example.

Software architecture is being widely used today to describe a very high-level design methodology of large software systems. Software architecture represents the overall structure of a system in an abstract, structured manner. A good architectural representation scheme holds the key to the effectiveness of a software architecture description and usage. In this work we look at architectural styles and architectural representation schemes. We propound the idea that the layered architectural model is a suitable candidate for a generalized architectural style and that it can cater to many different problem domains, other than the message-passing systems it has traditionally been used to model. We propose some rules by which the layered architectural style can be improved and modified in order to be able to model a wider problem domain. Then we evaluate different methods of architectural representations that have been used to model software architecture and analyze their strengths and shortcomings. We propose the use of a modified data flow diagram architecture representation scheme. This scheme is called AND-OR DFD method and is introduced and developed in this thesis. The main concept introduced here is a combination of components to form action groups to support multiple workflows and the relationships among them, without significant increase in the architectural complexity. Finally, we look at UML as a prospect for a generalized architecture description language and discuss its merits and demerits with examples.

This is a report of the Leadership and Management in Software Architecture workshop that took place at ICSE 2008. The workshop focused on the non-technical aspects of software architecture. In particular, it focused on the skills that a software architect should have as well as the type of support an organization should provide for the architect.

Software architecture analysis plays an important role in software development lifecycle. However, from the view of separation of concerns, there is an absence of both structural description and behavioural analysis of software architecture. This paper proposes an aspect-oriented software architecture (AOSA) to reduce the complexity of software model and improve the reliability of software system. Aspect-oriented architecture description language based on XML is defined for structural description of software architecture, while aspect-oriented statechart and temporal logic are used for its behavioural analysis. A carousel case illustrates that the formal method is effective.

Software architecture is widely recognized as one of the most fundamental concepts in software engineering, because of the fact, that today’s software systems are assembled from components with different characteristics: for example heterogenous, legacy or distributed systems. At the software architecture level, designers combine subsystems into complete systems using different techniques, e.g. “Architecture Description Languages” (ADLs). There exists a number of ADLs, each of which is specialized for one or more architectural styles. They are designed by different research groups with different goals in mind corresponding to their mental model on how software architecture can be expressed in the most efficient and elegant way. As a result, ADLs are not compatible with each other, so that it is difficult to present a homogeneous view of the software architecture of a system assembled from different components. This paper presents an approach how architectural styles can be combined using a concept of ADL-interchange.KeywordsSoftware ArchitectureDescription LanguageArchitectural StyleService LayerAbstract State MachineThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Architecture description languages (ADLs) play an important role in specifying the software architectures. While most of these ADLs are unable to deal with the change directly, especially for dynamic evolution of software systems. This paper proposes an XML-based ADL, named Breeze/ADL, which is supported by Breeze Graph Grammar (BGG) - a graph grammar we defined, to describe software architecture and capture the change in the architecture definition. Our approach is explained in two directions. First, we give the basic definitions of Breeze/ADL, and then show how to map the BGG to Breeze/ADL to specify the structural model, style constraints and dynamic evolution. The other direction is that we use a Client/Server application as a running example to demonstrate our approach throughout this paper. In this approach, the software architecture description has both a textual and a graph representations, and the unplanned change can be captured and defined.

Software architecture lies at the backbone of any software system and its choice directly influences important non-functional characteristics such as maintainability, extensibility, etc. Up-to-date software architecture descriptions should be at any time available to support the analysis and evaluation of the current state of the architecture. However the current state of the art lacks both methodologies and tools for ensuring availability of architecture descriptions and fails to offer objective means for evaluating software architectures. Currently, no generally accepted method for comparing software from an architecture point of view exists. In this paper, we present our current results towards creating a so-called architecture quality index that includes a bidirectional architecture quality model as well as a quality benchmark created for the context of the ARAMIS research project. The proposed architecture quality index aims to support the architects to evaluate and compare the architecture of software systems based on information extracted during the considered systems' run-time.

Software architecture defines the components and the interaction in between the components of a system. It also defines how the components are interacting with each other, the dependency in between the components and the interface protocols used for communication. For a network-based application, system performance is based on network communication. Therefore, selection of the appropriate architectural style(s) for use in designing the software architecture can make the difference between success and failure in the deployment of a network-based application. There are so many architectural styles available to represent different network-based application. According to the behaviour of the application we have to choose the appropriate architectural style. In this paper we have surveyed different architectural styles for Network-based application. Keywords: Software architecture, software architectural style, network-based application

The application of AI technology in architectural software has brought various innovations and changes to the industry. By introducing convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks, architectural design software is expected to automatically identify and generate complex architectural images, optimize the design process, and provide intelligent design assistance. Through literature research, this paper aims to discuss the specific application of CNN and DNN in parametric design and the innovation brought by them, and analyzes the application of these technologies in architectural image recognition, generation, design optimization and other aspects. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers in related fields and promote the innovative application of AI technology in architectural design. The application of AI technology in architectural software has brought numerous innovations and changes to the industry. By introducing convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks, architectural design software is expected to automatically identify and generate complex architectural images, optimize the design process, and provide intelligent design assistance. Through literature research, this paper aims to discuss the specific application of CNN and DNN in parametric design and the innovation brought by them; it also analyzes the application of these technologies in architectural image recognition, generation, design optimization, and other aspects. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers in related fields and promote the innovative application of AI technology in architectural design.

The software architecture is typically defined as the fundamental organization of the system embodied in its components, their relationships to one another and to the system's environment. It also encompases principles governing the system's design and evolution. In order to manage the architecture of a large software system the architect needs a holistic model that supports continuous integration and verification for all system artifacts. In earlier papers we proposed a unified graph-based approach to the problem of managing knowledge about the architecture of a software system. In this paper we demonstrate that this approach facilitates convenient and efficient project measurement. First, we show how existing software metrics can be translated into our model in a way that is independent of the programming language. Second, we introduce new metrics that cross the programming language boundaries and are easily implementable using our approach. We conclude by demonstrating how the new model can be implemented using existing tools. In particular, graph databases are a convenient implementation of an architectural repository. Graph query languages and graph algorithms are an effective way to define metrics and specialized graph views.

The focus of this paper is the design and implementation of dependable quality requirements, and their incorporation in the description of software architecture in an explicit and structured manner. More specifically, we propose three architectural styles for developing dependable collaboration-based software designs based on three notions: (i) the idealized fault-tolerant component model, (ii) the collaboration/role interaction model, and (iii) computational reflection together with a set of design patterns that focus on providing design solutions for implementing fault tolerance techniques, namely, error handling, coordinated recovery and software redundancy. Computational reflection defines a meta-level architecture that is composed of a base level where the application’s logic is implemented and a meta level where meta components are responsible for implementing the application’s quality requirements in a way that it is transparent to application designers. Application designers can apply the notion of separation of concerns and concentrate their attention on the functional requirements, abstracting from the quality requirements.

With the gradual development of enterprise information systems, the enterprises' knowledge is in the environment of heterogeneous sources. This paper analyzes the barriers to knowledge integration under such condition. It is pointed that software systems, as support of the knowledge integration, is the key enabler of knowledge integration, and that the software usability is the major issue of the system design. In addition, the relationship between the software usability (focused on knowledge aggregation, knowledge reuse and personalization) and the software architecture is discussed. Furthermore, recommendations for the software architecture design are provided to support effective knowledge integration.