Evaluating software specifications by comparison
Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference on Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership in a Diverse, Multidisciplinary Environment
Assisting conformance checks between architectural scenarios and implementation
Information and Software Technology
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A practical approach is presented to making behaviour a concrete, first-class architectural concept. The approach overcomes the forest-tree problem that results when the only way of understanding behaviour in rela-tion to the organizational aspect of architecture is in terms of sequences of inter-component interactions that emerge at run time (calls, messages, etc). The approach centers around diagrams called Use Case Maps (UCMs) that super-impose sets of continuous wiggly lines (representing signatures of causal sequences) onto arrangements of boxes (representing organizational structure). A powerful feature of the approach is its ability to express large scale dynamic situations clearly. This paper does not present UCMs for the first time, but provides new insight into their essence in relation to architectural issues, alerts workers in the field of software architecture who have not encoun-tered them before to their possibilities, and introduces for the first time a demonstration-of-concept tool to support them.