Essay About Software Architecture Evolution Framework And Software Systems

Software Architecture Evolution Framework
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SAEF “Software Architecture Evolution Framework” –
The Vision
1.1 Motivation
In many cases, informal architectural diagrams are available to the personnel who
maintain software systems. However, there is little tool support linking such architectural
descriptions to system requirements and the source code. This can create a number of
problems. For example, inconsistencies can arise between the requirements, the
architectural artefacts and the source code, making the code-base the only trustworthy
representation of the system. Consequently maintainers are forced to adopt a code centric
approach whereby they work with a large, complex and formal representation of the
system.
1.2 Three Facets of Software Architecture Evolution
Typically, software maintenance is performed in a code centric fashion, whereby mental
models of the software architecture are developed by maintenance engineers through
analysis of the code base. In many cases, informal architectural diagrams are available to
facilitate this comprehension but there is no formal support for the capturing of these
mental models. When the system evolves a maintenance engineer’s mental model also
evolves but rarely is the new architecture documented.
The question is how can this information be captured, maintained and presented in such a
way that increases the understanding of a software system and reduces maintenance
effort?
In trying to answer this question our initial research has identified three major areas of
interest concerning the evolution of software systems:
Reference
ArchJava
– Architecture, while the concept of architecture continues to be a source of
considerable debate in the software community, its importance in industry is
widely accepted. Software architecture is an abstraction of the organisation of the
structural elements of a software system. The relationships between structural
elements are governed by collaborations that are mediated through interfaces. The
architecture disciplines the composition of the static and the behavioural elements
into progressively larger subsystems. The advent of Architecture Description
Languages (ADLs) within the academic community provides a structured
framework for the specification of software systems.
– Process,
– Semantics, currently component composition is achieved manually by maintainers
semantically interpreting syntactic types at the interface level. To semi automate
this process would require the system itself to have knowledge of the relationships
between the syntactic types of component interfaces and their associated
semantics. The term Domain Knowledge Engineering has been used to describe
the process of semantic capture and mining. It is often the case that in the absence
of a structured approach to domain knowledge engineering:
o The definitions of many significant domain concepts remain buried in text
based use case descriptions.
o Data dictionaries, when used, are populated with subjective descriptions of
domain terms. Quite often, the same term will have different descriptions
deposited in the dictionary during requirements and analysis.