Validating Consistency between Architecture and Design Descriptions

Special-purpose languages like ADLs [1] are very useful for modeling difficult and elusive concerns. ADLs provide a wide range of powerful and rigorous methods and frequently also support the analysis and simulation of problems or solutions. For generalpurpose modeling, using ADLs may sometimes be an overkill. We therefore believe that general-purpose models like the Unified Modeling Language (UML) [2] are useful complements to ADLs. UML was defined in such a manner that it can be understood by a large population of software developers and beyond. The unified nature and simplicity have made UML the leading object-oriented design language there is today. Further, UML design constructs map more easily to the actual source code of a system. To that end, UML provides a variety of views, such as class, object, sequence, activity, statechart, and use-case views. Those views span a wide range of concerns and support structural, behavioral and scenario modeling.