Modeling software architectures in the Unified Modeling Language

ABSTRACT

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a family of design notations that is rapidly becoming a de facto standard software design language. UML provides a variety of useful capabilities to the software designer, including multiple, interrelated design views, a semiformal semantics expressed as a UML meta model, and an associated language for expressing formal logic constraints on design elements. The primary goal of this work is an assessment of UML's expressive power for modeling software architectures in the manner in which a number of existing software architecture description languages (ADLs) model architectures. This paper presents two strategies for supporting architectural concerns within UML. One strategy involves using UML "as is," while the other incorporates useful features of existing ADLs as UML extensions. We discuss the applicability, strengths, and weaknesses of the two strategies. The strategies are applied on three ADLs that, as a whole, represent a broad cross-section of present-day ADL capabilities. One conclusion of our work is that UML currently lacks support for capturing and exploiting certain architectural concerns whose importance has been demonstrated through the research and practice of software architectures. In particular, UML lacks direct support for modeling and exploiting architectural styles, explicit software connectors, and local and global architectural constraints.

REFERENCES

• 1: ABI-ANTOUN,M.AND MEDVIDOVIC, N. 1999. Enabling the refinement of a software architecture into a design. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language (UML'99, Fort Collins, CO). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 17-31.
• 2: Robert John Allen , David Garlan, A formal approach to software architecture, 1997
• 3: Robert Allen , David Garlan, Formalizing architectural connection, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software engineering, p.71-80, May 16-21, 1994, Sorrento, Italy
• 4: Robert Allen , David Garlan, A formal basis for architectural connection, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.6 n.3, p.213-249, July 1997 [doi>10.1145/258077.258078]
• 5: Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh , Ivar Jacobson, The Unified Modeling Language user guide, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 1999
• 6: Robert H. Bourdeau , Betty H. C. Cheng, A Formal Semantics for Object Model Diagrams, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.10, p.799-821, October 1995 [doi>10.1109/32.469459]
• 7: Elisabetta Di Nitto , David Rosenblum, Exploiting ADLs to specify architectural styles induced by middleware infrastructures, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.13-22, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/302405.302406]
• 8: EGYED,A.AND MEDVIDOVIC, N. 1999. Extending architectural representation in UML with view integration. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language (UML'99, Fort Collins, CO). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 2-16.
• 9: Alexander Egyed , Nenad Medvidovic, A Formal Approach to Heterogeneous Software Modeling, Proceedings of the Third Internationsl Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering: Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on the Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2000, p.178-192, March 25-April 02, 2000
• 10: Martin S. Feather , Stephen Fickas , Anthony Finkelstein , Axel Van Lamsweerde, Requirements and Specification Exemplars, Automated Software Engineering, v.4 n.4, p.419-438, October 1997 [doi>10.1023/A:1008680612960]
• 11: Colin Fidge, Logical Time in Distributed Computing Systems, Computer, v.24 n.8, p.28-33, August 1991 [doi>10.1109/2.84874]
• 12: David Garlan, First international workshop on architectures for software systems workshop summary, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.20 n.3, p.84-89, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/219308.219322]
• 13: David Garlan , Robert Allen , John Ockerbloom, Exploiting style in architectural design environments, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.175-188, December 06-09, 1994, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 14: GARLAN,D.AND KOMPANEK, A. 2000. Reconciling the needs of architectural description with objectmodeling notations. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language (UML 2000, York, UK, October), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany.
• 15: David Garlan , Robert Monroe , David Wile, Acme: an architecture description interchange language, Proceedings of the 1997 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, p.7, November 10-13, 1997, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 16: David Garlan , Walter Tichy , Frances Paulisch, Summary of the Dagstuhl workshop on software architecture, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.20 n.3, p.63-83, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/219308.219320]
• 17: GARLAN,D.AND SHAW, M. 1993. An Introduction to Software Architecture: Advances in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. I. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore.
• 18: David Harel, Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems, Science of Computer Programming, v.8 n.3, p.231-274, June 1, 1987 [doi>10.1016/0167-6423(87)90035-9]
• 19: David Harel , Amnon Naamad, The STATEMATE semantics of statecharts, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.5 n.4, p.293-333, Oct. 1996 [doi>10.1145/235321.235322]
• 20: C. A. R. Hoare, Communicating sequential processes, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1985
• 21: Christine Hofmeister , Robert Nord , Dilip Soni, Applied software architecture, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 22: Ivar Jacobson , Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh, The unified software development process, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 23: Philippe Kruchten, The 4+1 View Model of Architecture, IEEE Software, v.12 n.6, p.42-50, November 1995 [doi>10.1109/52.469759]
• 24: Philippe Kruchten, The Rational Unified Process: an introduction, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 25: Leslie Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.7, p.558-565, July 1978 [doi>10.1145/359545.359563]
• 26: David C. Luckham , John J. Kenney , Larry M. Augustin , James Vera , Doug Bryan , Walter Mann, Specification and Analysis of System Architecture Using Rapide, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.4, p.336-355, April 1995 [doi>10.1109/32.385971]
• 27: David C. Luckham , James Vera, An Event-Based Architecture Definition Language, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.9, p.717-734, September 1995 [doi>10.1109/32.464548]
• 28: Jeff Magee , Jeff Kramer, Dynamic structure in software architectures, Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.3-14, October 16-18, 1996, San Francisco, California, United States
• 29: Proceedings of the third international workshop on Software architecture, November 1998
• 30: Nenad Medvidovic , Peyman Oreizy , Jason E. Robbins , Richard N. Taylor, Using object-oriented typing to support architectural design in the C2 style, Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.24-32, October 16-18, 1996, San Francisco, California, United States
• 31: Nenad Medvidovic , Peyman Oreizy , Richard N. Taylor, Reuse of off-the-shelf components in C2-style architectures, Proceedings of the 1997 symposium on Software reusability, p.190-198, May 17-20, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• 32: MEDVIDOVIC,N.AND ROSENBLUM, D. S. 1997. Domains of concern in software architectures and architecture description languages. In Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on Domain Specific Languages (Santa Barbara, CA, Oct.), Usenix Association, Berkeley, CA, 199-212.
• 33: Nenad Medvidovic , David S. Rosenblum, Assessing the Suitability of a Standard Design Method for Modeling Software Architectures, Proceedings of the TC2 First Working IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA1), p.161-182, February 22-24, 1999
• 34: Nenad Medvidovic , David S. Rosenblum , Richard N. Taylor, A language and environment for architecture-based software development and evolution, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.44-53, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/302405.302410]
• 35: Nenad Medvidovic , Richard N. Taylor, Separating fact from fiction in software architecture, Proceedings of the third international workshop on Software architecture, p.105-108, November 01-05, 1998, Orlando, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/288408.288435]
• 36: Nenad Medvidovic , Richard N. Taylor, A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.26 n.1, p.70-93, January 2000 [doi>10.1109/32.825767]
• 37: MEDVIDOVIC, N., TAYLOR,R.N.,AND WHITEHEAD,JR., E. J. 1996. Formal modeling of software architectures at multiple levels of abstraction. In Proceedings of the California Software Symposium 1996 (Los Angeles, CA, Apr.). University of Southern California, Center for Software Engineering and University of California, Irvine, Irvine Research Unit in Software, Los Angels, 28-40.
• 38: Nikunj R. Mehta , Nenad Medvidovic , Sandeep Phadke, Towards a taxonomy of software connectors, Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering, p.178-187, June 04-11, 2000, Limerick, Ireland [doi>10.1145/337180.337201]
• 39: Mark Moriconi , Xiaolei Qian , R. A. Riemenschneider, Correct Architecture Refinement, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.4, p.356-3, April 1995 [doi>10.1109/32.385972]
• 40: OBJECT MANAGEMENT GROUP. 2000. OMG UML Specification Version 1.3. Object Management Group, Needham, MA.
• 41: Dewayne E. Perry , Alexander L. Wolf, Foundations for the study of software architecture, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.17 n.4, p.40-52, Oct. 1992 [doi>10.1145/141874.141884]
• 42: Jason E. Robbins , Nenad Medvidovic , David F. Redmiles , David S. Rosenblum, Integrating architecture description languages with a standard design method, Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Software engineering, p.209-218, April 19-25, 1998, Kyoto, Japan
• 43: ROSCOE, A. W. 1998. Two Papers on CSP. Technical monograph PRG-67, Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Oxford, UK.
• 44: James Rumbaugh , Ivar Jacobson , Grady Booch, The Unified Modeling Language reference manual, Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd., Essex, UK, 1998
• 45: SCATTERGOOD, B. 1998. The Semantics and Implementation of Machine-Readable CSP. Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, Oxford, UK.
• 46: Bran Selic, Turning clockwise: using UML in the real-time domain, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.10, p.46-54, Oct. 1999 [doi>10.1145/317665.317675]
• 47: Bran Selic , Garth Gullekson , Paul T. Ward, Real-time object-oriented modeling, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1994
• 48: SELIC,B.AND RUMBAUGH, J. 1998. Using UML for Modeling Complex Real-Time Systems. ObjectTime white paper, March 11, 1998. Accessed June 2000 at Web site http://www. objectime.com/otl/technical/umlrt.pdf.
• 49: Mary Shaw, Procedure Calls Are the Assembly Language of Software Interconnection: Connectors Deserve First-Class Status, Selected papers from the Workshop on Studies of Software Design, p.17-32, May 17-18, 1993
• 50: Mary Shaw , Robert DeLine , Daniel V. Klein , Theodore L. Ross , David M. Young , Gregory Zelesnik, Abstractions for Software Architecture and Tools to Support Them, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.21 n.4, p.314-335, April 1995 [doi>10.1109/32.385970]
• 51: SHAW,M.AND GARLAN, D. 1995. Formulations and formalisms in software architecture. In Computer Science Today: Recent Trends and Developments, J. van Leeuwen (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 1000. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 307-323.
• 52: SHAW, M., GARLAN, D., ALLEN, R., KLEIN, D., OCKERBLOOM, J., SCOTT,C.,AND SCHUMACHER, M. 1995. Candidate model problems in software architecture. Unpublished manuscript. Available from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/compose/www/html/ModProb/.
• 53: Dilip Soni , Robert L. Nord , Christine Hofmeister, Software architecture in industrial applications, Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Software engineering, p.196-207, April 24-28, 1995, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/225014.225033]
• 54: TAYLOR,R.N.,MEDVIDOVIC, N., ANDERSON, K. M., WHITEHEAD,JR., E. J., ROBBINS, J. E., NIES,K.A.,
• 55: Richard N. Taylor , Nenad Medvidovic , Kenneth M. Anderson , E. James Whitehead, Jr. , Jason E. Robbins , Kari A. Nies , Peyman Oreizy , Deborah L. Dubrow, A Component- and Message-Based Architectural Style for GUI Software, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.22 n.6, p.390-406, June 1996 [doi>10.1109/32.508313]
• 56: TIGRIS. 2000. Design your UML models with ArgoUML. http://argouml.tigris.org/v08/press-release. html.
• 57: Will Tracz, DSSA (Domain-Specific Software Architecture): pedagogical example, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.20 n.3, p.49-62, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/219308.219318]
• 58: VESTAL, S. 1996. MetaH Programmer's Manual, Version 1.09. Technical report, Honeywell Technology Center.
• 59: Enoch Y. Wang , Heather A. Richter , Betty H. C. Cheng, Formalizing and integrating the dynamic model within OMT, Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering, p.45-55, May 17-23, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/253228.253239]
• 60: Jos Warmer , Anneke Kleppe, The object constraint language: precise modeling with UML, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1998
• 61: WOLF, A. L. (Ed.). 1996. Proceedings of the Second International Software Architecture Workshop (ISAW-2, San Francisco, CA, Oct.).

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Standardization

Keywords:
C2, Object Constraint Language, Rapide, Unified Modeling Language, Wright, formal modeling, object-oriented design, software architecture