Software Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography

• Jonathan Aldrich, Craig Chambers, and David Notkin. ArchJava: Connecting Software Architecture to Implementation. In proceedings of ICSE 2002, May 2002.
• Andersson, Jonas and Johnson, Pontus, Architectual Integration Styles for Large-Scale Enterprise Software Systems, Proceedings of Fifth IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2001, Page 224-236.
• Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, Gary Chastek, Pat Donohoe, and Fabio Peruzzi, Architecture Based Design Method, Technical Report, CMU/SEI-2000-TR-001, January 2000. The report presents a systematic and comprehensive method to construct a conceptual architecture of a product line or large-scale software system. The method is based on iterative model. The first iteration is a nine steps process. The input of the method is a list of requirements and constraints; the output of the method is a list of architecture decisions including views, design elements and design templates. There is another related report that helps to understand how to apply this method in a real life project. [Morgan Yingfu Lu] (See also Morgan's slides on this paper.)
• T. Ball, S.G. Eick; Software visualization in the large; Computer, Volume 29, Issue 4, April 1996
• Bass, Len; Clements, Paul; Kazman, Rick; Klein, Mark; Evaluating the Software Architecture Competence of Organizations WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):249 - 252
• D. Batory; Product-Line Architectures; International Conference on Software Engineering, 1998
• Andreas Bauer, Markus Pizka, Contribution of Free Software to Software Evolution, Institut fur Informatik, Technische Universit at Munchen, Boltzmannstr. 3, Germany 85748 Garching, Page 170, Sixth International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE'03) September 01 - 02, 2003, Helsinki, Finland. Paper discusses how free software is developed and what kind of role the architecture plays. Notably, it discusses architectural issues of Mozilla.
• Berghammer, R. et al, The RELVIEW System, from Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. The Relview system is a tool designed to support the manipulation, analysis and visualization of data represented as binary relations. It is currently an active research project of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics of Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel.  More information can be found at the Relview WWW Page .  The system provides the ability to view and edit relations from two views, a binary boolean matrix and a directed graph.   The system also provides many ways for manipulating relations.  These are provided through the user interface and also a fairly extensive programming language. There is a potential for using this system to manipulate the facts about a software system in order to obtain architectural views, although the Relview project has not considered this possibility so far. [James Keast] (See also Keast's notes and slides on this work.)
• Ivan T. Bowman, Richard C. Holt and Neil V. Brewster, Linux as a Case Study: Its Extracted Software Architecture, ICSE 99, Los Angeles, May 99. This paper describes an approach to extracting the conceptual and concrete architectures from a large software system where no such documentation previously existed Using a recent version of Linux as a software guinea pig, the authors used a combination of automated tools and manual effort to build a visual representation of the overall structure of the operating system's kernel. In particular, the process of extracting the file subsystem architecture is described in detail. In an iterative process, the results generated from the automated tools were manipulated based on knowledge of a conceptual model. The final result was a graphical representation of the file subsystem structure that can aid in understanding the system from a high level. Finally, the differences between the abstract and concrete architectures are presented along with possible explanations for those differences. [Richard Gregory] (See also Gregory's slides on this work.)
• Grady Booch, The architecture of Web applications
• Grady Booch, When Worlds Collide
• * Buhr, R.J.A. and Casselman, R.S., Architectures with Pictures, OOPSLA '92, pp 466-483. This paper advocates the use of wired and wireless architectural diagrams to illustrate high level architecutral style. Wired architectures have static connections between components while wireless components have dynamic "soft links" between components. They use a very basic notation for their links between components. Large lines are used to indicate communication between components (no direction is used). The authors introduce the idea of a time thread which passes through various components of an architecture. Designs can be made in terms of timethreads in two ways: Time threads can be defined first, then components can be defined to complete the task. Components with similar roles can then be merged. Alternatively, components can be defined first and then timethreads are strung between components. The use of animated diagrams illustrating component collaboration over time was advocated to illustrate the dynamic behavior of an architecture. They also discuss contracts between components and discuss component-component interactions in terms of contracts between components. [Chris Pal] (See also Chris Pal's notes and slides on this paper.)
• *+ Buxton, John and McDermid, John, Architectual Design (Chapter 17), pp. 17/1 - 17/33, in Software Engineer's Reference Book, CRC Press, 2000 Corporate Blvd NW, Boca Raton, Florida, 33431, 1993. This paper discusses 'architectural design', which is described as the high-level design which follows requirements analysis, but precedes any detailed design. This paper (being a chapter from a book) is quite long, and covers a number of ideas relating to architectural design. The paper first presents design principles and notations for the ideal design process. Acknowledging that the ideal design process is essentially impossible, pragmatic guidelines/heuristics for architectural design are suggested. Next, the importance of analysis and review of architecture designs is explained. Finally, the paper presents some existing methods (e.g. HOOD, SSADM) which could be used for architectural design. [Jason Chase] (See also McDermid's group web page with its bibliography.)
• Carmichael, I., Tzerpos, T and Holt, R.C., Design Maintenance: Unexpected Architectural Interactions, IEEE Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, Nice, France, October 1995, pp. 134-137.
• +Consens, M, Mendelzon, A., and Ryman, Arthur, Visualizing and Querying Software Structures, IBM Labs Canada Tech Report 74.053, Sept 1991.
• Jeromy Carriere, Rick Kazman, Assessing Design Quality From a Software Architectural Perspective, Technical Report, CMU/SEI. This report draws on the authors' experiences with Software Architectures and Object Oriented Systems in order to relate how a good object oriented design and a well designed architecture are related. Some ideas are presented on what the definition of good design might be, and how how that good design can be achieved.[M. Kaastra] (See also Mike Kaastra's slides on this paper.)
• Paul C. Clements; A Survey of Architecture Description Languages; International Workshop on Software Specification and Design, 1996
• Dagtas, Serhan; Natchetoi, Yuri; Wu, Huaigu; Hamdi, Louenas; An Integrated Lightweight Software Architecture for Mobile Business Applications WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):41 - 50
• +Dart, S.A., The Past, Present, and the Future of Configuration Management, Tech Report CMU/SEI-92-TR-8, Carnegie-Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute, July 1992.
• +Dean, T.R. and Cordy, J.R., A Syntactic Theory of Software Architecture, Special Issue on Software Architecture, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 21,4 (April 1995), pp. 302-313.
• * +Deremer, F., Kron, H.H. Programming-in-the-large versus Programming-in-the-Small, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol SE-2, No 2, June 1976. This 'classical' paper argues for the need to distinguish between programming-in-the-large and programming-in-the-small. It is argued that "...structuring a large collection of modules to form a 'system' is an essentially distinct and different intellectual activity from that of constructing the individual modules". To this end, a separate language is needed to allow programmers to express their intent regarding the system structure: a Module Interconnection Language (MIL). The motivation and goals for an MIL are explicated, and a sample MIL, (MIL75), is presented. This paper is an early attempt to resolve issues pertaining to the construction of large scaled software systems which are still prevalent today. [Siddiqi]
• * Eades, Peter, A Heuristic for Graph Drawing, Congressus Numerantium, Vol 42 (1984), pp 149-160. This paper presents a heuristic for laying out graphs that works well for graphs of order less than 30. The algorithm views the graph as a physical system, having nodes which are adjacent being attracted to each other while non-adjacent nodes repel each other. The algorithm provides a good initial layout of a graph. [Dan Frank]
• What is a software architecture?, Peter Eeles, The Rational Edge, Developer Works, IBM, 15 Feb 2006.
• Characteristics of a software architect, Peter Eeles, The Rational Edge, Developer Works, IBM, 12 Mar 2006.
• Eick, Stephen G., Todd L. Graves, Alan F. Karr, J.S. Marron, Audris Mockus, Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data, IEEE Trans on Software Engineering, Vol. 27, No 1, pp 1-12, 1990.
• A. Mockus, R.T. Fielding and J. Herbsleb, Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 11(3), 1-38, July 2002.
• Feijs, L, Krikhaar, R., and VanOmmering, R., A Relational Approach to Support Software Architecture Analysis, [URL accessible from U Waterloo] Software Practice and Experience, Vol 28(4), pp 371-400, April 1998.
• Fowler, Martin, Who Needs an Architect? IEEE Software
• A. Frick, A. Ludwig and H. Mehldau, A fast adaptive layout algorithm for undirected graphs, Proceedings of Graph Drawing'94, LNCS 894, Springer Verlag 1995. (See also .)
• +Gamma, E, Helm, R., Vlissides, J. Design Patterns: Abstraction and Reuse of Object-Oriented Design, ECOOP 93, Germany, 1993.
• Gangopadhyay, D., ObjChart: Tangible Specification of Reactive Object Behavior, Tech Report RC-18627, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Jan 1993.
• * + Garlan, David and Shaw, Mary, An Introduction to Software Architecture, Advances in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Volume 1, World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993. In this paper, the authors provide an introduction to the field of Software Architecture. Their purpose is to illustrate the current state of the discipline and examine the ways in which architectural design can impact software design. The authors outline a number of common architectural styles based on practical experience: pipes and filters, data abstraction, implicit invocation, layered systems, repositories, and table driven interpreters. While it is important to understand the individual nature of each of these styles, most systems typically involve some combination of several styles. The authors show how heterogeneous styles can be combined in a single design. Next, the authors use six case studies to illustrate how architectural representations of a software system can improve the understanding of complex systems. Finally, the authors survey some of the outstanding problems in the field of Software Architecture, and consider a few of the possible future directions for research. The abstract from the paper is as follows: As the size of software systems increases, the algorithms and data structures of the computation no longer constitute the major design problems. When systems are constructed from many components, the organisation of the overall system -- the software architecture -- presents a new set of design problems. This level of design has been addressed in a number of ways including informal diagrams and descriptive terms, module interconnection languages, templates and frameworks for systems that serve the needs of specific domains, and formal models of component integration mechanisms. In this paper we provide an introduction to the emerging field of software architecture. We begin by considering a number of common architectural styles upon which many systems are currently based and show how different styles can be combined in a single design. Then we present six case studies to illustrate how architectural representations can improve our understanding of complex software systems. Finally, we survey some of the outstanding problems in the field, and consider a few of the promising research directions. [Ladan Tahvildari] (See also Ladan's notes on this paper and Bowman's notes on this paper.)
• * Garlan, David and Allen, R., and Ockerbloom, J., Architectural Mismatch or, Why Reuse is So Hard, IEEE Software, November 1995. This paper attempts to develop and new techniques to cope with mismatches between assembled software components. The paper argues that there exist fundamental differences between compositional problems that occur due to low-level issues of interoperability such as differing programming languages or database designs and problems of architectural mismatch. They argue that problems of architectural mismatch are a more pervasive class of problem. They illustrate the types of mismatch that they experienced building software development environments from existing parts. They argue that key mismatch issues centre around the assumptions the reusable parts make about the structure of the application in which the developers expect the part to appear, yet do not necessarily make explicitly clear. Based on this experience they show how an architectural view can help expose and highlight some of these compositional problems. [Chris Pal] (See also Pal's notes and slides and Hassan's slides on this paper.)
• David Garlan, Software Architecture: a Roadmap, ICSE 2000, 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Future of Software Engineering Track, June 4-11, 2000, Limerick Ireland, ACM, 2000. The paper examines some of the important trends of software architecture. It describes the roles of architecture in software systems development and summarizes the past and current state of research and practice. It also considers some of the forces that are changing the world of software systems themselves, and speculates on emerging trends, challenges, and aspirations. [Maher Shinouda]
• Gerald Gannod and Shilpa Murthy, Verification of Recovered Software Architectures, IWPC 2003: Proceedings of 2003 International Workshop on Program Comprehension, May 2003
• Goossen, Jack Alexander; Henriksson, Tomas; Media Player Software in a System of Subsystems WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):61 - 70
• Gorton, Ian; Wynne, Adam; Almquist, Justin; Chatterton, Jack; The MeDICi Integration Framework: A Platform for High Performance Data Streaming Applications WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):95 - 104
• +Harel, David On Visual Formalisms, CACM, 31,5, May 88.
• + Harel, D., Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems, Science of Computer Programming 8 (1987) 231-274, Elsevier, North Holland.
• * Harel, David and Eran, Gery, Executable Object Modeling with Statecharts, ICSE 96, Mar 1996, Berlin, pp 246-257. The paper describes an object-oriented modeling technique based on visual formalisms. The modeling technique consists of two modeling languages (O-Charts and Statecharts) which respectively describe the structure and behavior of a system. The paper informally describes the formal syntax and semantics of these two languages and uses a rail-car system as an example. The topic of behavioral inheritance is introduced and cited as an area of future research. The languages are supported in the form of a tool called O-MATE which generates executable code given O-Charts and Statecharts. [Moataz Kamel] (See also Kamel's slides on this paper.)
• David R. Harris and Howard B. Reubenstein and Alexander S. Yeh, Reverse Engineering to the Architectural Level, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp 186-195, April 1995 This paper presents an architecture recovery framework that integrates reverse engineering technology and architectural style representations. The authors claim that by using this framework, an analyst can recover custom, dynamic documentation to fit a variety of software analysis requirements. This framework is made of 3 components: architectural representation, a source code recognition engine and a library of recognition queries, and a "Bird's Eyes" program overview capability. The architecture style and the query library of this framework are discussed in details with examples. Then, this paper addresses some questions about bridging the gaps to system understanding. Also, the framework attempts to inform the analyst about the percentage of the code that implements architectural commitments by using a preliminary code coverage metric. As many papers in software architecture, this paper provides an example of using this architecture recovery framework. Finally, the authors describe the several areas in which they intend to extend to their architecture recovery framework. [Eric Lee] (See also Lee's slides on this paper.)
• Ahmed E. Hassan and Richard C. Holt, Reference Architecture for Web Servers, WCRE 2000: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Brisbane, Australia, Nov 6, 2000.
• Holt, R.C., Permission Theory for Software Architecture Plus Phantom Architectures , School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, September 2005. See slides.
• + Holt, R.C., Penny, D.A., and Mancoridis, S. Multicolour Programming and Metamorphic Programming: Object-Oriented Programming-in-the-Large, CASCON 92, IBM Canada Ltd Lab Centre for Advanced Studies, Toronto, Ont, Nov 92.
• *+ Holt, R.C., Binary Relational Algebra Applied to Software Architecture, CSRI Tech Report 345, University of Toronto, March 1996.
• Holt, R.C., An Introduction to the Grok Programming Language, technical Report, University of Waterloo, May 2002.
• Holt, R.C., An Introduction to TA: the Tuple-Attribute Language, technical Report, University of Waterloo, 1997.
• Holt, R.C., Software Architecture as a Shared Mental Model, International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Paris, June, 2002.
• Richard C. Holt, Andreas Winter, Andy Schurr, GXL: Toward A Standard Exchange Format, local copy, WCRE 2000: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Brisbane, Australia, Nov 6, 2000. GXL is an XML sublanguage used for representing typed, attributed, directed graphs. Its main purpose was to promote interoperability between reverse engineering tools that use these types of graphs to represent software programs. It was derived from other similar languages such as TA, RSF, and Grax which were used in other reverse engineering tools/toolkits. Besides defining what GXL is and what it was derived from, this paper attempts to give us an idea of the history of these langauges and the tools that have used them. By doing this they have also shown that GXL is capable of the same work (using the premise that anything they could do, GXL could do as well since it was derived from their features). They then attempt to validate the language by proving that GXL meets a certain list of criteria for "Software Exchage Languages" derived from three other papers. These criteria include scalability, extensibility, and coverage of a number of different languages. [Andrew Trevors] See Andrew Trevor's slides on GXL.
• Richard C. Holt, Grokking Software Architecture, WCRE 2008: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Antwerp, Belgium, October 2008.
• Jerding, Dean and Rugaber, Spencer, Using Visualization for Architecturual Localization and Extraction, Proceedings of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE97, pp. 56-65, October 1997, Amsterdam, Netherlands. This paper discusses the use of static and dynamic extraction in obtaining software system architecture. For practical purposes, this information is then used to localize the addition of components into the system by examining the extracted architecture and determining the best place for inclusion of that new component. To accomplish this, the authors describe a tool called ISVis that they have developed; this tool implements the static and dynamic extraction methods described. [Ryan Bannon] (See also Ryan Bannon's slides on this paper.)
• * Kazman, R., Bass, L., Abowd, G. and Clements, P., An Architectural Analysis Case Study: Internet Information Systems A methodology for comparing candidate architectures is presented. Specific emphasis is placed on "task scenarios" which are hypothetical situations posed for the purpose of assisting in the evaluation of qualities which would otherwise be considered difficult to measure. Examples of the methodology are shown in reference to Internet Information Systems. [Christopher Trudeau] (See also Trudeau's notes)
• Kazman, R. and Carriere, S.J., View Extraction and View Fusion in Architectural Understanding, submitted to 5th Int'l Conf on Software Reuse, 1998.
• * Kazman, R., Mark Klein and Paul Clements, Abowd, G. and Clements, P., ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation, Aug 2000, Tech Report CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004.
• Klein, John; Interplay of Architecture, Business Goals, and Current Technology in the Evolution of Call Center Systems WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):93 - 94
• Kreger, Heather, Web Services Conceptual Architecture (WCSA 1.0), IBM, May 2001
• Rene L. Krikhaar, Software Architecture Reconstruction, Doctoral thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1999
• * Kruchten, P.B., The 4+1 Views Model of Architecture, IEEE Software, Nov 95, pp 42-50. This paper aims to remedy the problem of presenting many concerns on one software architecture diagram. The 4+1 View Model was developed using Phillipe Kruchten's experiences as a software architect of Rational Software Inc. The five concurrent views are: Logical View, Process View, Development View, Physical View and Scenarios. Each view shows a specific aspect of the system that is modeled. This makes it possible for each group of stakeholders to focus on the views that they are concerned with. Most of the views used the Booch notation. The process is mainly driven by the logical view which can be described by Class Diagrams and State Transition Diagrams. Software developers using an Object Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology will find this paper useful to organize their views of the system. (See also Tanuan's slides and Hassan's slides on this paper.)
• Lampson, Butler L., Hints for Computer System Design , ACM Operating Systems Rev. 15, 5 (Oct. 1983), pp 33-48. Reprinted in IEEE Software 1, 1 (Jan. 1984), pp 11-28.
• M. Lanza, S. Ducass; Polymetric views - a lightweight visual approach to reverse engineering; IEEE Transactions onSoftware Engineering, Volume 29, Issue 9, Sept. 2003
• Levin, R. and McJones, P., The Vesta Approach to Precise Configuration of Large Software Systems, SRC Research Report 105, Digitial Equipment Corporation, June 1993.
• Lindgren, Markus; Norstrom, Christer; Wall, Anders; Land, Rikard; Importance of Software Architecture during Release Planning WICSA 2008. Seventh Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on 18-21 Feb. 2008 Page(s):253 - 256
• * Lindig, Christian and Snelting, Gregor, Assessing Modular Structure of Legacy Code Based on Mathematical Concept Analysis, ICSE 97, Boston MA, pp 349-359. The focus of this research is to attempt to automate modularization of legacy code. To this end, the technique of mathematical concept analysis based on set theory is applied to software systems. The paper explains how module structures show up in a concept lattice. Cohesion and coupling are defined and methods for resolving interferences between modules are presented. The method is applied to several examples written in Modula-2, Fortran, and Cobol with limited success. They conclude that the language used affects the modularization potential. Also, automatic modularization is possible only if there is still some hidden structure, but fails on software which is near entropy death. From the abstract: We apply mathematical concept analysis in order to modularize legacy code. By analysing the relation between procedures and global variables, a so-called concept lattice is constructed. The paper explains how module structures show up in the lattice, and how the lattice can be used to assess cohesion and coupling between module candidates. Certain algebraic decompositions of the lattice can lead to automatic generation of modularization proposals. The method is applied to several examples written in Modula-2, Fortran, and Cobol; among them a > 100kloc aerodynamics program. [Moataz Kamel] (See also Kamel's slides on this paper.)
• C.-H. Lung and K. Kalaichelvan, A Quantitative Approach to Software Architecture Sensitivity Analysis, Proc. of the Int'l Conf. on Software Eng and Knowledge Eng, June 1998, pp. 185-192.
• Chung-Horng Lung, Sonia Bot, Kalai Kalaichelvan, and Rick Kazman, An Approach to Software Architecture Analysis for Evolution and Reusability, Proceedings of CASCON '97, November 1997.
• J.I. Maletic, A. Marcus, L. Feng; Source Viewer 3D (sv3D) - a framework for software visualization; International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003
• * S. Mancoridis, ISF: A Visual Formalism for Specifying Interconnection Styles for Software Design, International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (to appear, 1998). See also shorter version "Customizable Notations for Software Design" by Mancoridis. The motivation for ISF (Interconnection Style Formalism) is to understand the structure of a software system. An understanding of the relationships between components and dependencies leads to the success during the implemention, testing, and maintenance stages of the system. Unlike most software design notations, ISF is customizable while still remaining formal. The visual aspect of ISF consist of labelled boxes and directed edges. The arrangements of the boxes (components/entities) and edges (edge relations) must obey ISF rules, ergo the formal side of ISF. There are two ISF rules: permission rules which indicate what is permissable under the current configurations of the components and dependencies; and definition rules which allows new relations to be defined. Different interconnection styles have different sets of permission rules and definition rules. Mancoridis gave an ISF specification for the export style and the tube style. [John Tran]
• S. Mancoridis, Customizable Notations for Software Design, In the ACM/IEEE Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering , Madrid, Spain, June, 1997.
• Spiros Mancoridis, Toward a generic framework for computing subsystem interfaces, Joint proceedings of the second international software architecture workshop (ISAW-2) and international workshop on multiple perspectives in software development (Viewpoints '96) on SIGSOFT '96 workshops, 1996, pages 106-110, San Francisco, California, United States
• S. Mancoridis, B. S. Mitchell, C. Rorres, Y. Chen, E. R. Gansner, Using Automatic Clustering to Produce High-level System Organizations of Source Code, IEEE Proceedings of 6th International Workshop on Program Understanding, Ischia, Italy, June, 1998. This paper presents a fully automatic technique that creates a hierarchical view of the system organization based on the components and relationships that exist in the source code. The first step in this technique is to represent the system modules and module-level relationships as a module dependency graph (MDG). Then, a collection of algorithms is applied to partition the graph in a way that derives the high-level subsystem structure from the component-level relationships that are extracted from the source code. The goal of this software modularization process is to automatically partition the components of a system into clusters (subsystems) so that the resultant organization concurrently minimizes inter-connectivity (connections between the components of two distinct clusters) while maximizing intra-connectivity (connections between the components of the same cluster). Bunch is the clustering tool that applies the clustering algorithms to the module dependency graph. This paper also presents a case study that illustrates the automatic software modularization technique. This paper concludes by outlining the research benefits and limitations of the work along with discussion of the future plans to improve the technique. [Ladan Tahvildari] (See also Ladan's notes on this paper.)
• Nenad Medvidovic, Alexander Egyed, and Paul Gruenbacher, Stemming Architectural Erosion by Coupling Architecture Discovery and Recovery, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop from Software Requirements to Architectures (STRAW), 2003. Paper discusses how to prevent arch erosion by studying and synthesizing requirements and implementation.
• * Mendonca, N.C. and Kramer, J., Requirements for an Effective Architecture Recovery Framework, Proc 2nd International Software Architecture Workshop (ISAW-2), pp 101-105, 1996. This paper discusses two topics. First, the current frameworks for reverse engineering for architectural analysis are presented. Second, the authors propose a new framework for architectural recovery and analysis. The five existing frameworks discussed are: filtering and clustering, compliance checking, analyzers generators, program understanding, and architecture recognition. Their proposed framework is based on a combination of these ideas including an additional extraction step to recognize architectural elements. [Matt Armstrong] (See also Armstrong's slides on this paper.)
• Minsky, N.H. and Rozenshtein, C. Configuration Management by Consensus: An Application of Law-Governed Systems, ITIRC March 1992.
• Minsky, N.H., Law-Governed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Sept 1991.
• +Minsky, N.H., Law-Governed Regularities in Object Systems; Part I: Principles, Theory and Practice in Object Systems (TAPOS) 1996. http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~minsky/index.html
• * Robert T. Monroe, Andrew Kompanek, Ralph Melton, and David Garlan, Architectural Styles, Design Patterns, and Objects, IEEE Software, Jan 97, pp 43-52. This paper describes the relationship between software architecture and object-oriented design (OOD), as well as the relationship between architectural styles and design patterns. First of all, the authors present what architectural designs and styles are, along with their purposes and benefits. Then, the authors describe applying object-oriented design to software architecture and the differences between architectural design and OOD. Finally, the authors compare/contrast architectural styles and design patterns. This paper concludes that architectures, architectural styles, objects and design patterns are complementary aspects of design and none of them completely subsumes the other. [Eric Lee] (See also Lee's slices on this paper.)
• *+ Müller, Hausi A., Mehmet, O.A., Tilley, S.R., and Uhl, J.S., A Reverse Engineering Approach to Subsystem Identification, Software Maintenance and Practice, Vol 5, 181-204, 1993. This paper presents a reverse-engineering methodology that utilizes the Rigi system. This paper describes an approach to creating higher-level abstract representation of a system, which involves the identification of related components and dependencies, the construction of layered subsystem structures, and the computation of exact interfaces among subsystems. This paper concludes with a detailed, step-by-step analysis of a 30-module image rendering program by applying their subsystem composition methodology. [Ladan Tahvildari] (See also Ladan's notes on this paper.)
• *+ Murphy, G.C, Notkin, D., and Sullivan, K., Software Reflexion Models: Bridging the Gap between Source and High-Level Models, Proceedings of the Third ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '95) This paper presents a way to map a source-code model into a developer's high-level software model. This is acheived by using a mapping from files to high-level modules. Using the given mapping, software reflexion tools can map a source-code model (which is a relation on files) into a high-level model (which is a relation on modules). After the mapping is done, software reflexion tools can identify the differences between the high-level model and the source-code model. The user of these is tools is able to have a better understanding of a software system by noting divergences and absences between the source-code model and the high-level model. [Itai Danan]
• Ciaran O'Reilly, Philip Morrow, and David Bustard, School of Computing and Information Engineering, University of Ulster, Coleraine, BT52 1SA, Northern Ireland, {c.oreilly, pj.morrow, dw.bustard}@ulster.ac.uk, Lightweight Prevention of Architecture Erosion, Sixth International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE'03), Page 59, September 01 - 02, 2003, Helsinki, Finland. A straightforward and easy-to-read paper. It shows an easy to apply approach to preventing architecture approach. It is close to Khrikkar's work and to work at the University of Waterloo.
• Ossher, Harold, A Mechanism for Specifying the Structure of Large, Layered Programs, RC12300, Nov 86, 27 pages.
• Pal, Chris, A Technique for Illustrating Dynamic Component Level Interactions Within a Software Architecture
• Parker, Greg, Franck, Glenn, and Ware, Colin, Visualization of Large Nested Graphs in 3D, Special issue of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing. 9, 299-317.
• Parnas, D.L., Software Aging , Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software engineering, Sorrento, Italy, Pps 279 - 287, 1994
• +Parnas, D.L., On Criteria to be used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, CACM, 14,1, pp 221-227, April 72
• Parnas, D.L., On the Design and Development of Program Families, IEEE TSE (special issue), SE-2, Dec 76
• Parnas, D.L., and Clements, P.C., Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It, IEEE TSE, SE12,2, pp. 251-257, Feb 86.
• * + Perry, Dewayne E. and Wolf, Alexander L., Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture, alternate source, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 17:4, October 1992 pp 40-52. This paper aims to build the foundation for software architecture. The authors presented a model of software architecture that consists of three components: elements, form, and rationale. Components of the model in the context of both architecture and architectural styles were discussed. They conclude by presenting some of the benefits of their approach to software architecture, summarizing their contributions, and relating their approach to Schwanke et al., Zachman, and Shaw. The abstract from the paper is as follows: 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. [Meyer Tanuan]
• Perry, Dewayne E., A Product Line Architecture for a Network Product, manuscript was reviewed, paper since revised, 1998. The paper describes how a generic architecture that supports dynamical reconfigurability can be defined for a (network) product line (a range of products with similar characteristics). The generic characteristics (independence of the exact components in a given system in the line) of the architecture are achieved by addressing distribution (where are the components) at design and implementation layers. The system should have a model of itself, a command broker providing location transparency, a reconfiguration manager and reconfigurable components. The architecture is split into reconfiguration and domain-specific components. One of the points the paper makes is that identifying the abstractions (the connection in the case network product line) can help organize the system around them. It also shows that for a viable architectural solution relevant aspects (at architectural level) should be taken from both system objects and system functionality (i.e. a hybrid approach).[Andrei Dragoi] (See also Dragoi's notes on this paper.)
• Damien Pollet, Stéphane Ducasse, Loïc Poyet, Ilham Alloui, Sorana Cîmpan and Hervé Verjus, Towards A Process-Oriented Software Architecture Reconstruction Taxonomy, 11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), IEEE Computer Society, Amsterdam, March 2007, best paper award.
• Raymond, Eric S., The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Firstmonday, 1998.
• Reinder Bril, Rene, Krikhaar, and Andre, Postma, Embedding architectural support in industry, Proceedings International Conference on Software, Maintenance, p348-357, IEEE Computer Society, 2003.
• Rotschke, Tobias and Krikhaar, Rene, Architecture Analysis Tools to Support Evolution of Large Industrial Systems, ICSM 02, International Conference on Software Maintenance.
• +Ryman, Arthur, The Theory-Model Paradigm in Software Design, Tr 74.048, 11 Oct 89, IBM Canada Lab Tech Report
• +Schwanke, R. W., Altucher, R.Z., Platoff, M.A., Discovering, Visualizing, and Controlling Software Structure, Siemens Corp. Research, Inc., 755 College Rd East, Princeton, NJ 08540
• Schwanke,R.W., Platoff, M.A., Cross References are Features, 2nd International Workshop on Software Configuration Management, p 86-96, 1989. In the context of this paper a cross reference is any relation between two entities (e.g. module A calls module B, A uses variable V, procedure P calls procedure Q). The authors consider that if A calls B than this can be seen as A having the feature (i.e. property) of calling B, and B has the feature of being called. Based on this observation a new clustering measure can be defined, based on shared neighbors (e.g. if A calls B and A calls C then C and be have the common feature of being called by A - i.e. share the neighbor A). This measure can be used as an alternative to the cohesion strength for summarizing call graphs. It can also be used in splitting large include files and in improving the modularity of a system, by finding the misplaced files (according to the measure). The authors have prototyped a system (ARCH) that uses the measure for the previous tasks. ARCH should is used in an iterative process which involve feedback from a human architect. The paper points out that the described measure should be use as a complement, not a replacement of the various cohesion based measures. [Andrei Dragoi] (See also Dragoi's notes on this paper.)
• * Schwanke, Robert W., An Intelligent Tool for Re-engineering Software Modularity, Proc ICSE 91, Austin TX, May, 1991, pp 81-92. This paper describes a program which attempts to reverse engineer software in order to better provide software modularity. By looking at which procedures reference data structures of the same name, the program will group them together assuming this implies a modular relationship. In practice, this was a useful tool but required hand tuning of various constants in order to provide meaningful groupings. [Dan Frank]
• * Shaw, M. and Clements, P., A Field Guide to Boxology: Preliminary Classification of Architectural Styles for Software Systems, C.S. Dept and Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon Univ, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. This paper extends the previous work of Garlan and Shaw, by further defining software architecture styles. Characteristics of various styles are examined in order to distinguish between styles. Control and data flow are analyzed with respect to topology, synchronicity, continuity, and binding time. A table is given with twenty-five common architectures, each analyzed with respect to the above criteria. In-depth analysis is done on a small selection of these architectures showing variations on each. [Jen Campbell]
• S.E. Sim, C.L.A. Clarke, R.C. Holt, A.M. Cox; Browsing and Searching Software Architectures; International Conference on Software Maintenance, 1999
• * Soni, D., Nord, R., and Hofmeister, C., Software Architecture in Industrial Applications, IEEE ICSE 95. From the abstract: To help us identify and focus on pragmatic and concrete issues related to the role of the software architecture in large systems, we conducted a survey of a variety of software systems used in industrial applications. Our premise, which guided the examination of these systems, was that software architecture is concerned with capturing the structures of a system and the relationships among the elements both within and between structures. The structures we found fell into several broad categories: conceptual architecture, module interconnection architecture, code architecture and execution architecture. These categories address different engineering concerns. combined with specialized implementation techniques decreased the complexity of implementation and improved reuse and reconfiguration. [James Keast] (See also Keast's slides on this paper.)
• Sowa, J.F. and Zachman, J.A., Extending and Formalizing the Framework of Information Systems Architecture, IBM Systems Journal, Vol 31, No 3, 1992.
• C. Stoermer, L. O'Brien, C. Verhoef, Practice Patterns for Architecture Reconstruction , (abstract), Ninth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'02), October 29 - November 01, 2002, Richmond, Virginia
• M.D. Storey, H.A. Mller, K. Wong; Manipulating And Documenting Software Structures; International Conference on Software Maintenance, 1995
• * Sugiyama, Kozo, Shojiro, Tagawa, and Toda, Mitsuhiko, Models for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures, IEEE Trans on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol SMC-11, No 2, Feb 1981, pp 109-125. The Sugiyama graph layout algorithm uses a heuristic to quickly display hierarchical graphs in a visually understandable way. This layout is effective for many graphs, and the techniques described are useful to authors of software-architecture tools. Bowman's notes summarize the algorithm discussed in the paper, and provide an example implementation. Several improvements to the algorithm have been made; for a summary of recent graph drawing research, see Cruz and Tamassia's tutorial on graph drawing. [Ivan Bowman]
• Torvalds, Linus, Comments on Designing Linux , Nov 2001.
• Tran, John B., and Holt, Richard C., Forward and Reverse Repair of Software Architecture, CASCON '99, Toronto, November 1999.
• Tzerpos, V. and Holt, R.C., and Farmaner, G., Web-Based Presentation of Hierarchic Software Architecture, Workshop on Software Engineering (on) the World Wide Web, International Conference on Software Engineering 1997, Boston, May 19, 1997.
• * Tzerpos, V. and Holt, R.C., The Orphan Adoption Problem in Architecture Maintenance, Proceedings of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering 1997, Amsterdam, October 1997. The reverse engineering of a legacy application without aid from the original developers or design documentation is a difficult task. Subsystem structure is usually not inherently visible from the source code, and is changed over the course of the evolution of the software system. This paper focuses on the effects of software evolution on the structure of the software system. Two problems are identified as being particularly important, namely the orphan adoption problem and the kidnappee adoption problem. The orphan adoption problem is that of incremental clustering. That is, finding the appropriate subsystem to place a newly introduced resource. The kidnappee adoption problem is that of corrective clustering, or the movement of resources from one subsystem to another as structural change is introduced. An algorithm is presented which attempts to address these problems using resource names, resource dependencies, and classification of resources as being either functional or utility resources. Case studies are provided which study the efficacy of the presented algorithm in addressing the orphan adoption problem. [Saheem Siddiqi] (See also Hassan's slides on this paper.)
• Vassilios Tzerpos, R. C. Holt, ACDC: An Algorithm for Comprehension-Driven Clustering, WCRE 2000: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Brisbane, Australia, Nov 6, 2000.
• +Ware, C., Hui, D. and Franck, G., Visualizing Object-Oriented Software in Three Dimensions, CASCON 93.
• Wiggerts, Theo A., Using Clustering Algorithms in Legacy Systems Remodularization, pp 33-43, WCRE, Oct 1997. Like so many other papers on clustering and software reengineering, this one begins by describing how large systems become structurally decayed over long periods. The study of clustering began in the field of biology over twenty-five years ago and has spread to many other disciplines, including software engineering, which has an interest in grouping related entities together. The paper argues that in system remodularization, many people have either been reinventing clustering technology or could be aided by it, thus the goal of this paper is to provide an overview of clustering. The paper continues by describing what clustering is and discusses how one might determine the degree of similarity between nodes and between newly formed clusters. Various clustering algorithms using different measures of similarity are also presented. Finally, approaches that researchers have taken to apply clustering techniques to existing systems are listed. [Richard Gregory] (See also Gregory's slides on this work.)

Also see:

• SEI bibliography on software architecture
• SEI web site on Software Architecture Publications
• Dewayne Perry's web page on Software Architecture
• Jianjun Zhao's Bibliography on Software Architecture Analysis
• See also the Worldwide Institute of Software Architecture

Last updated 6 May 2008