A Syntactic Theory of Software Architecture

  • Authors:
  • Thomas R. Dean;James R. Cordy

  • Affiliations:
  • Queens Univ. at Kingston, Kingston, Ont., Canada;Queens Univ. at Kingston, Kingston, Ont., Canada

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on software architecture
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

In this paper we introduce a general, extensible diagrammatic syntax for expressing software architectures based on typed nodes and connections and formalized using set theory. The syntax provides a notion of abstraction corresponding to the concept of a subsystem, and exploits this notion in a general mechanism for pattern matching over architectures. We demonstrate these ideas using a small example architecture language with a limited number of types of nodes and connectors, and a small taxonomy of architectures characterized as sets of patterns in the language.