Verification support for plug-and-play architectural design

Shangzhu Wang, George S. Avrunin, Lori A. Clarke
2006 Proceedings of the ISSTA 2006 workshop on Role of software architecture for testing and analysis - ROSATEA '06  
In software architecture, components are intended to represent the computational units of the system and connectors are intended to represent the interactions between those units. Choosing the semantics of these interactions is a key part of the design process, but the wide range of alternatives from which to choose and the complexity of the behavior affected by the choices makes it difficult to get them right. We propose an approach in which connectors with particular semantics are constructed
more » ... from a library of pre-defined building blocks and changes in the semantics of a connector can be accomplished by replacing some of its building blocks with others. In our approach, a small set of standard interfaces allows components to communicate with each other through a wide variety of connectors, so the impact on components for even substantial changes in the semantics of the connectors is minimized. In this paper, we focus on the way this approach supports design-time verification to provide feedback about the correctness of the design. By enhancing the re-use of models of both components and connectors, this approach has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of verification as a design evolves.
doi:10.1145/1147249.1147255 dblp:conf/issta/WangAC06 fatcat:thjqrnlahzcpjo5wjti4xv67rq