The contribution of architecture description languages to the evaluation of software architectures

摘要

Identifying limitations and mistakes within software architectures at the design stage is often cost-efficient and reduces the overall system’s development and marketing time. A number of techniques have emerged over recent years, for assessing both single-systems, and product-line architectures. These techniques do not assume any particular format or language for the description of the architecture. Often however, they do require the ability to extract a range of information from the architecture description. In this research, we looked at the relationships between the features that might be provided by a formal architecture description language (ADL), and the information required for architecture assessment purposes. We also designed a set of visual tools for use within the architecture development and assessment process in order to alleviate and aid the human part of the process.