Assessing the Suitability of a Standard Design Method for Modeling Software Architectures

Abstract

Software architecture descriptions are high-level models of software systems. Most existing special-purpose architectural notations have a great deal of expressive power but are not well integrated with common development methods. Conversely, mainstream development methods are accessible to developers, but lack the semantics needed for extensive analysis. In our previous work, we described an approach to combining the advantages of these two ways of modeling architectures. While this approach suggested a practical strategy for bringing architectural modeling into wider use, it introduced specialized extensions to a standard modeling notation, which could also hamper wide adoption of the approach. This paper attempts to assess the suitability of a standard design method “as is” for modeling software architectures.Key wordsSoftware architecturearchitectural styleobject-oriented designarchitecture description languagesUnified Modeling Language