Explicitly Integrated Architecture - An Approach for Integrating Software Architecture Model Information with Program Code

Software-Architekturspezifikationen und -Implementierungen sind zwei Sichtweisen auf Softwarearchitektur. Sie beschreiben gemeinsame Aspekte, wie z.B. die Existenz und Verbindung von Komponenten. Die Spezifikation fügt Informationen zum Design, zur Kommunikation und zur Analyse hinzu. Die Implementierung beschreibt stattdessen zusätzlich Details für ein ausführbares System. Die Konsistenz zwischen diesen Darstellungen manuell zu verwalten, ist schwierig und fehleranfällig. Diese Arbeit stellt einen Ansatz vor, der Informationen der Architekturspezifikation vollständig in die Implementierung integriert, sodass die Spezifikation als eigenständiges Artefakt nicht mehr notwendig ist. Das Tool Codeling extrahiert die integrierte Architekturspezifikation in unterschiedlichen Sprachen aus dem Code und propagiert Änderungen in dieser Spezifikation automatisch an den Code zurück.Specifications and implementations are both viewpoints upon software architecture. Besides common aspects, the specification adds information for design, communication, or analysis, while the implementation adds details for an executable system instead. Managing the consistency between these representations manually is difficult and error-prone. This thesis presents an approach, that completely integrates architecture specifications with the implementation, so that separate specification artifacts are not necessary anymore. The tool Codeling extracts integrated architecture specifications in multiple languages from code, and automatically propagates changes in these specifications back to the code

Automated Analysis and Code Generation for Domain-Specific Models

Abstract—Domain-specific languages (DSLs) concisely express the essential features of system designs. However, using a DSL for automated analysis and code generation requires developing specialized tools. We describe how to create model analysis and code generation tools that can be applied to a large family of DSLs, and show how we created the LIGHT platform, a suite of such tools for the family of software architecture-based DSLs. These tools can be easily reused off-the-shelf with new DSLs, freeing engineers from having to custom-develop them. The key innovation underlying our strategy is to enhance DSL metamodels with additional semantics, and then automatically synthesize configurations and plug-ins for flexible analysis and code generation frameworks. Our evaluation shows that, for a DSL of typical size, using our strategy relieves software engineers of developing approximately 17,500 lines of code, which amounts to several person-months of programming work. I