Exploiting Style in Architectural Design Environments

As the design of software architectures emerges as a discipline within software engineering, it will become increasingly important to support architectural description and analysis with tools and environments. In this paper we describe a system for developing architectural design environments that exploit architectural styles to guide software architects in producing specific systems. The primary contributions of this research are: (a) a generic object model for representing architectural designs; (b) the characterization of architectural styles as specializations of this object model; and (c) a toolkit for creating an open architectural design environment from a description of a specific architectural style. We use our experiencein implementing these conceptsto illustrate how style-oriented architectural design raises new challenges for software support environments.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: David Garlan, Robert Allen, John Ockerbloom
• Keywords: Architectural Design, Architectural Design Environment, Architectural Style, SIGSOFT 1994, Software Engineering