Abstract

Most current-day software engineering tools and environments do not sufficiently allow software engineers to declare or enforce the intended software architecture. On the one hand, architectures are typically described at a too lowlevel, inhibiting their evolution and understanding. On the other hand most tools provide little support to automatically verify whether the source code conforms to the architecture. Therefore, a formalism is needed in which architectures can be expressed at a sufficiently abstract level, without losing the ability to perform automatic conformance checking. We propose to declaratively codify software architectures using virtual software classifications and relationships among these classifications. We illustrate how software architectures can be expressed elegantly in terms of these virtual classifications and how to keep them synchronized with the source code.

Citations