Designing Software Architectures as Knowledge Specializations

Object-oriented methods aim at providing natural ways for decomposing (or composing) a system into (from) objects that correspond to concepts in the customer's problem domain. The identified objects are the basic building blocks of the object-oriented system to be constructed. In order not to disregard relevant objects, most methods advise software engineers to take dedicated steps such as reading books about the problem domain, interviewing customers, etc. We consider two important concerns in understanding the problem domain. First, it is very important to identify all the objects that are required for defining a consistent system, at least in its minimum configuration. Second, identified objects must serve as composable building blocks to construct robust, adaptable and reusable architecture

Evaluating Software Architectures: Development Stability and Evolution

We survey seminal work on software architecture evaluationmethods. We then look at an emerging class of methodsthat explicates evaluating software architectures forstability and evolution. We define architectural stabilityand formulate the problem of evaluating software architecturesfor stability and evolution. We draw the attention onthe use of Architectures Description Languages (ADLs) forsupporting the evaluation of software architectures in generaland for architectural stability in specific

Creating product line architectures

The creation and validation of product line software architectures are inherently more complex than those of software architectures for single systems. This paper compares a process for creating and evaluating a traditional, one-of-a- kind software architecture with one for a reference software architecture. The comparison is done in the context of PuLSE-DSSA, a customizable process that integrates both product line architecture creation and evaluation

A Review on Software Architectures for Heterogeneous Platforms

The increasing demands for computing performance have been a reality regardless of the requirements for smaller and more energy efficient devices. Throughout the years, the strategy adopted by industry was to increase the robustness of a single processor by increasing its clock frequency and mounting more transistors so more calculations could be executed. However, it is known that the physical limits of such processors are being reached, and one way to fulfill such increasing computing demands has been to adopt a strategy based on heterogeneous computing, i.e., using a heterogeneous platform containing more than one type of processor. This way, different types of tasks can be executed by processors that are specialized in them. Heterogeneous computing, however, poses a number of challenges to software engineering, especially in the architecture and deployment phases. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study that aims at discovering the state-of-the-art in software architecture for heterogeneous computing, with focus on deployment. We conduct a systematic mapping study that retrieved 28 studies, which were critically assessed to obtain an overview of the research field. We identified gaps and trends that can be used by both researchers and practitioners as guides to further investigate the topic

Designing Software Architectures As a Composition of Specializations of Knowledge Domains

This paper summarizes our experimental research and software development activities in designing robust, adaptable and reusable software architectures. Several years ago, based on our previous experiences in object-oriented software development, we made the following assumption: ‘A software architecture should be a composition of specializations of knowledge domains’. To verify this assumption we carried out three pilot projects. In addition to the application of some popular domain analysis techniques such as use cases, we identified the invariant compositional structures of the software architectures and the related knowledge domains. Knowledge domains define the boundaries of the adaptability and reusability capabilities of software systems. Next, knowledge domains were mapped to object-oriented concepts. We experienced that some aspects of knowledge could not be directly modeled in terms of object-oriented concepts. In this paper we describe our approach, the pilot projects, the experienced problems and the adopted solutions for realizing the software architectures. We conclude the paper with the lessons that we learned from this experience