Designing a software system's architecture properly is one of the most important tasks of any software engineering project. Nevertheless there exists no common definition of the term "software architecture" and no standard software architecture description language (ADL). This paper discusses whether the standard OO modeling language UML is a standard ADL, explains some deficiencies if used for this purpose, and makes a proposal of how to eliminate these deficiencies. The proposal is based on the widely accepted idea that elements of the component-based OO modeling language ROOM should be integrated with UML. It explains why the idea of merging static structure diagrams of ROOM with behavior describing collaboration diagrams of UML is not sufficient and presents an additional approach for the integration problem. Keywords Architecture Description Language, Unified Modeling Language, Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling, UML, ROOM, Software Architecture, Software Component...
Bernhard Rumpe, M. Schoenmakers, Ansgar Radermache