PREVENTING MISMATCH OF HOMOGENEOUS COMPONENTS IN THE DESIGN OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

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The objective of this work is to examine the feasibility of, as well as to learn about, a process of developing software architecture that prevents the possibility of mismatch between homogeneous components implemented according to the architectural specification. This paper shows how the architecture can be organized, which restrictions it can use and, provided that they are used, how elaborate it should be in order to ensure that independently-developed artifacts are structurally compatible. Two components are deemed structurally compatible as long as they have appropriate code to avoid mismatch. Since the focus of the paper is on the structural forms of mismatch, the results are derived under the assumption that no run-time environment can prevent a component from executing any path in its code. The paper develops a formal model of architecture that provides a minimal set of concepts in terms of which the designers can reason about incompatibility of components. The model is used to identify the causes of structural mismatch and examine alternative ways of eliminating these causes. Following that, the paper adopts a set of architectural restrictions and shows how these restrictions can be applied in the design of software architectures to prevent the possibility of structural mismatch.