Toward Composit ion Of Style-Conformant Software Architectures

The codification of software architectural decisions made to address recurring software development challenges results in architectural styles. The primary benefit of architectural styles is that properties demonstrated at the level of a style are carried over into the software system architectures constructed using that style. However, in the absence of comprehensive techniques for checking conformance of a software architecture to its style(s), the expected stylistic properties are not always present in the architecture. This paper argues for a need to look beyond the existing formalizations of styles and architectures to construct style-conformant software architectures. The paper proposes a compositional formalization of styles and style-based architectures aimed at ensuring an architecture’s conformance to its style(s).