ABC: 一种全生命周期软件体系结构建模方法

Abstract

With the continually-increasing capability of computer hardware and scale of computer software, the complexity of software is also continually increasing, and has manifest itself as one of the key factors that limit the significant improvement of software quality and productivity. The structural complexity, especially the high-level structural complexity, is considered as the most important complexity of a software system. How to control the high-level structural complexity in efficient and effective ways has become a critical issue for large-scale software development in the Internet computing environment, which is open, dynamic and constantly changing. To resolve this problem, this article extends the software architecture (SA) models-a kind of model aiming to control the high-level structural complexity on software designing-into the whole software lifecycle, and proposes an SA centric software development method, called ABC. The ABC method unifies the core artifacts in different software lifecycle phases into different kinds of SA models, and then the core activities of software development, deployment, maintenance and evolution are performed as the continual refinement, mapping, and transformation to these different kinds of SA models. In particular, this article aims to give a systematic introduction to the ABC method, and present some latest research outputs in collaborative feature modeling, runtime SA generation, and SA recovering.