Consistent Architectural Refinement and Evolution using the Unified Modeling Language

Authors: Alexander Egyed and Nenad Medvidovic

Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) comprise a sizeable set of modeling techniques that are aimed at bridging the gap between requirements engineering and low-level design and code. ADLs excel in their ability to model high-level functional and non-functional aspects of software systems and have demonstrated increasing support for trade-off analyses (i.e., requirements feasibility) and simulation. On the downside, ADLs are highly specialized and tend to rely on abstract notions such as roles and responsibilities. This creates problems when it comes to refining software artifacts into platform-specific programming constructs and combining solutions derived via different ADLs. Over the last years, we have devised mechanisms for transforming architecture models into implementation code by leveraging the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This paper presents an overview of our approach which is accompanied by extensive tool support

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