Ménage

A. van der Hoek, D. Heimbigner, and A.L.Wolf

Description

The discipline of software architecture has traditionally been concerned with high-level design. In particular, a variety of architecture description languages have been developed that are used to precisely capture a design. Additionally, analysis tools have been constructed that are used to verify particular properties of a design. However, today's trend towards the development of component-based software seems to suggest a new use of software architecture. Because an architecture precisely captures the components, the connections among them, and the interaction behaviors of the components, it could potentially be used as an organizing abstraction for many of the activities in the software life cycle.

Our research aims at investigating whether this vision can be made a reality. It consists of two parts.

Create a new language that extents software architecture with modeling capabilities for versioning and optionality.
Use this language as the basis for creating a configuration management and a software deployment system.

It is our belief that the first part is needed to make the second part a success, and we are currently designing and implementing a language that is based on Darwin. A configuration management and a software deployment system will be developed on top of this language to examplify how versioned software architecture can be used to improve support for two typical activities in the software life cycle.

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Papers

	Capturing Architectural Configurability: Variants, Options, and Evolution
	Configurable Software Architecture in Support of Configuration Management and Software Deployment
	Investigating the Applicability of Architecture Description in Configuration Management and Software Deployment
	Versioned Software Architecture
	System Modeling Resurrected
	Software Architecture, Configuration Management, and Configurable Distributed Systems: A Ménage a Trois