Dynamic Software Architecture Slicing

Software architectural design is becoming increasingly important in software engineering, as being manifested through various recent developments in the field such as the component-based software engineering paradigm and the distributed and collaborative computing paradigm. Abstraction is such a mechanism as the key concept underpinning software architecture, namely hiding the immense amount of details. Despite its long-recognized benefits, however, abstraction can also pose difficulties with the understanding and analysis of software architecture since one architecture can result in potentially an infinite number of different system behaviors. In order to alleviate such difficulties, we introduce the notion of dynamic software architecture slicing (DSAS), a methodology for using the notion, and an algorithm to generate dynamic software architecture slice. We demonstrate the feasibility and the expected benefits of the approach by using an illustrative example.