Analyzing architectural styles with alloy

The backbone of many architectures is an architectural style that provides a domain-specific design vocabulary and set of constraints on how that vocabulary can be used. Hence, designing a sound and appropriate architectural style becomes an important and intellectually challenging activity. Unfortunately, although there are numerous tools to help in the analysis of individual architectures, relatively less work has been done on tools to help the style designer. In this paper we show how to map an architectural style, expressed formally in an architectural description language, into a relational model that can be automatically checked for properties such as whether a style is consistent, whether a style satisfies some predicate over the architectural structure, whether two styles are compatible for composition, and whether one style refines another. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architecture— Languages Keywords software architecture, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Jung Soo Kim, David Garlan
• Keywords: Appropriate Architectural Style, Architectural Style, Domain-specific Design Vocabulary, ISSTA 2006