An Approach For Reusing Software Architecture At Design Phase

Software architecture, which is an overall design of system, can be reused in order to design the new software architecture at design phase during software life cycle. It is an important way to realize software reuse that reusing software architecture at design phase. There are some problems about a lot of existing methods and techniques which are related to architecture reuse. These problems lie in the difficulty of explicitly describing and using the information which supports the operation and the process of reusing software architecture. So it is hard to establish effective approach for reusing software architecture in order that a plenty of existing software architecture artifacts, which are worth to be reused, can not be easily reused.According to the problems mentioned above, this paper proposes an approach which can support the architecture reuse at design time. By use of this approach architects can reuse existing software architecture to finish the architecture design through describing and using the meta information of software architecture. In this approach existing architectures can be made into a kind of reusable coarse-grained software resource which is self-including and self-describing. This kind of software resource, which is considered as component, can be reused as a whole. Under support of this approach, architects can finish architecture design by reusing coarse-grained software resource.The main contributions of this paper are:(1) proposes the MIMSA from viewpoint of supporting architecture reuse. According to software architecture and its constituent elements, MIMSA defines systematically meta information which can support processes and operations of architecture reuse. (2) designs MetaADL which is a kind of description language for architectural meta information. MetaADL provides corresponding grammatical formative for all kinds of meta information defined in the MIMSA. In fact MetaADL provides the measure for describing standardly all kinds of meta information. MetaADL can also provide the technologic foundation for use of all kinds of meta information during architecture reuse. (3) designs and constructs RIM4RSA which is a reflective model for reusing software architecture. RIM4RSA includes base-level, meta-level and PMB. The base-level consists of information model and base-level operations. The meta-level consists of meta information model and meta-level operations. PMB defines the rules which are followed when the architecture reuse operations take place. In fact RIM4RSA prescribes a way to use architectural meta information and supports the process of architecture reuse by use of architectural meta information. (4) conducts formalization research on RIM4RSA. The research includes two aspects: one is the formal specification for base-level, meta-level and the interaction between the two levels of RIM4RSA; another is proof of correctness of the causal connection between the meta-level and the base-level in RIM4RSA on the basis of these formal specifications. (5) studys a concrete case to show the process of reusing software architecture under support of RIM4RSA. This case study may prove the correctness and effectiveness of the approach for reusing software architecture proposed in this paper.