Survey on software architecture design approaches and tools

Abstract

Software architecture provides a powerful way to manage the complexity of large software systems. Software architecture can help people to better understand the total structure of the system. It has emerged as a distinct form of abstraction for software systems with its own set of design issues, vocabulary, and rules.

In order to describe these architectures many methods have been invented. These are called Architecture description languages (ADLs) [1]. ADL is a formal language used to describe the structure and behaviour of software architecture. It provides features for modelling a software system’s conceptual architecture, distinguished from the system’s implementation.

This paper studies different ADL languages: Wright# , Acme, xADL 2.0, Aesop and its associated tools Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), AcmeStudio, ArchStudio, and AesopSystem using an ADL comparison framework and an architecture-style evaluation framework.

The ADL comparison framework looks into architecture modelling features and tool support offered by these selected ADLs. This comparison framework intends to highlight the general capabilities and qualities of ADLs.

The evaluation framework is complimentary to this general survey of ADLs. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of selected ADLs for their support to model the Client-server and Pipe-and-filter architecture styles.