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Supporting Consistency between Architectural Design Decisions and Component Models through Reusable Architectural Knowledge Transformations

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7957))

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Abstract

In recent years, the software architecture community has proposed to use architectural design decisions (ADDs) for capturing the design rationale and the architectural knowledge (AK). As software systems evolve both ADDs and architectural designs need to be documented and maintained. This is a tedious and time-consuming task because of the lack of systematic and automated support for bridging between ADDs and designs. As a result, decisions and designs become inconsistent over time. We propose to alleviate this problem by introducing an AK transformation language supporting reusable AK transformations from pattern-based ADDs to component-and-connector models. In addition, we devise reusable consistency checking rules for verifying the consistency between decisions and designs. Through the use of model-driven transformations, as well as reusable, pattern-based decision models, we ensure the reusability of our approach. We apply our approach in an industrial case study and show that it offers high reusability, is largely automated and scalable, and can deal with the complexity of large numbers of recurring decisions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Software Architecture Group, University of Vienna, Austria

    Ioanna Lytra, Huy Tran & Uwe Zdun

Authors
  1. Ioanna Lytra
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  2. Huy Tran
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  3. Uwe Zdun
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. LAAS, University of Toulouse, 31400, Toulouse, France

    Khalil Drira

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Lytra, I., Tran, H., Zdun, U. (2013). Supporting Consistency between Architectural Design Decisions and Component Models through Reusable Architectural Knowledge Transformations. In: Drira, K. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7957. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39031-9_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39031-9_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39030-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39031-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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