Plug-and-Play Architectural Design and Verification

Abstract. In software architecture, components represent the computational units of a system and connectors represent the interactions among those units. Making decisions about the semantics of these interactions is a key part of the design process. It is often difficult, however, to choose the appropriate interaction semantics due to the wide range of alternatives and the complexity of the system behavior affected by those choices. Techniques such as finite-state verification can be used to evaluate the impact of these design choices on the overall system behavior. This paper presents the Plug-and-Play approach that allows designers to experiment with alternative design choices of component interactions in a plug-and-play manner. With this approach, connectors representing specific interaction semantics are composed from a library of predefined, reusable building blocks. In addition, standard interfaces for components are defined that reduce the impact of interaction changes on the co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Shangzhu Wang, George S. Avrunin, Lori A. Clarke
• Keywords: Appropriate Interaction Semantics, Finite-state Verification, ICSE 2007, Software Engineering, Specific Interaction Semantics