Gregory D. Abowd
David Garlan
Abstract
The software architecture of most systems is usually described informally and diagrammatically by means of boxes and lines. In order for these descriptions to be meaningful, the diagrams are understood by interpreting the boxes and lines in specific, conventionalized ways. The informal, imprecise nature of these interpretations has a number of limitations. In this article we consider these conventionalized interpretations as architectural styles and provide a formal framework for their uniform definition. In addition to providing a template for precisely defining new architectural styles, this framework allows for analysis within and between different architectural styles.
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Index Terms
Formalizing style to understand descriptions of software architecture
Reviews
Marian Gheorghe
Software architecture is an important part of software systems. In this context, the systems are treated as collections of components communicating with each other in different ways and by means of some connections. The architectural descriptions are often informal and diagrammatic, using boxes to represent components and lines for the connections. The diagrams have conventional descriptions associated, but these are ambiguous and imprecise, so the architectural descriptions have serious limitations. In order to overcome these inconveniences, this paper introduces a formal approach for describing the conventional interpretations of the diagrammatic elements as architectural styles. An architectural style is a collection of conventions used to interpret a class of architectural descriptions. The main idea of this formal approach is to associate a formal framework, which maps the syntactic domain of the description into the semantic one, with an architectural style. In this framework, a new style can be defined by instantiating similar sets of definitions. To present this method, the authors first introduce the formal approach of an architectural style by defining the basic syntactic elements: components, connectors, and configurations. Then two architectural styles, pipe-filter and implicit invocation event system, are developed in the defined formal framework. The formal model is defined in the Z specification language. The last part analyzes the benefits of the formal model for software architecture. The author points out that when different formal methods are used, it is important to compute the costs to this process, since it is known that any formal approach increases the costs. The authors believe that their proposed formal approach succeeds. Among other facts, they mention the formal specifications of families of systems rather than individual systems, a set of general theorems applying to all the systems in the family, and the usefulness of the method for investigating a common framework for style specification, allowing for a new style to be specified as an incremental modification of an existing style. The paper ends with an appendix containing some common definitions in Z and some longer proofs and definitions. The paper is a valuable contribution to the formal description of software architecture. It discusses the usefulness of applying formal methods and their advantages and limitations.
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