| Software architecture is a subfield of software engineering that studies the structure or structures of a software system, having a direct impact on long-term, global stakeholder concerns such as performance, security, reliability, modifiability, usability, etc. When specified simultaneously, the details of many different structures comprising a software architecture are often overwhelming and can lead to information overload. To address this problem, the software architecture research community has relied on a concept called a view. An architectural view is a representation of a software architecture in terms of a tractable and related set of stakeholder concerns.; Despite consensus on its importance as a vehicle to specify and analyze software architectures in a manageable manner, the current practice of creating a new view type, defining it, and maintaining the integrity (especially, consistency) of its instances remains predominantly ad-hoc. This informal treatment of views is problematic because it introduces ambiguity and creates an information gap among stakeholders who will arrive at disparate interpretations for a supposedly same view.; One way of tackling the deficiencies of the existing view modeling approaches is to provide rigorous processes and standard artifacts through which one can unambiguously specify a view whose relationship to other views can be explicitly traced and formally defined. The author proposes a comprehensive view management framework including a novel meta-taxonomy of views and a new eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based language referred to as Architecture View Description Language (AVDL) devoted to precisely specifying architectural views.; Using the metamodel of AVDL, its companion process, and the Object Constraint Language (OCL), the author shows how to systematically create and formally define consistent architectural view types that leave little room for misinterpretation. Furthermore, the author discusses how AVDL specifications can be serialized into XML documents that are ideal for automatic processing (using a vast reservoir of XML-related standards). In particular, the author focus on how to enforce and validate consistency among multiple view specifications taking advantage of currently available XML and OCL tools. |
