Arcadia Papers: ABSTRACT
"Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture",
by Dewayne E. Perry and Alexander L. Wolf
in ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, vol. 17, no. 4,
pages 40-52, October 1992.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to build the foundation for software architecture.
We first develop an intuition for software architecture by appealing to several
well-established architectural disciplines. On the basis of this intuition, we
present a model of software architecture that consists of three components:
elements, form, and rationale. Elements are either processing, data, or
connecting elements. Form is defined in terms of the properties of, and the
relationships among, the elements---that is, the constraints on the elements.
The rationale provides the underlying basis for the architecture in terms of
the system constraints, which most often derive from the system requirements.
We discuss the components of the model in the context of both architectures and
architectural styles and present an extended example to illustrate some
important architecture and style considerations. We conclude by presenting
some of the benefits of our approach to software architecture, summarizing our
contributions, and relating our approach to other current work.
The Arcadia Project
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Last modified: Mon Feb 27 11:23:52 1995