Supporting consistency between architectural design decisions and component models through reusable architectural knowledge transformations

  • Authors:

  • Ioanna Lytra;Huy Tran;Uwe Zdun

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Computer Science, Software Architecture Group, University of Vienna, Austria;Faculty of Computer Science, Software Architecture Group, University of Vienna, Austria;Faculty of Computer Science, Software Architecture Group, University of Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • ECSA'13 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Software Architecture
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

In recent years, the software architecture community has proposed to use architectural design decisions (ADDs) for capturing the design rationale and the architectural knowledge (AK). As software systems evolve both ADDs and architectural designs need to be documented and maintained. This is a tedious and time-consuming task because of the lack of systematic and automated support for bridging between ADDs and designs. As a result, decisions and designs become inconsistent over time. We propose to alleviate this problem by introducing an AK transformation language supporting reusable AK transformations from pattern-based ADDs to component-and-connector models. In addition, we devise reusable consistency checking rules for verifying the consistency between decisions and designs. Through the use of model-driven transformations, as well as reusable, pattern-based decision models, we ensure the reusability of our approach. We apply our approach in an industrial case study and show that it offers high reusability, is largely automated and scalable, and can deal with the complexity of large numbers of recurring decisions.