Improving Architectural Description Languages to Support Analysis Better

Software architecture is an emerging new area. It encompasses the traditional area of software design with an emphasis on the design of distributed systems. Based on the past failures of complex design techniques to gain wide spread acceptance, software architecture languages must demonstrate that they provide significant value. A primary benefit will be the early detection of software faults. This is particularly important for distributed systems, since even simple distributed systems can be difficult to understand. This paper outlines some ways in which architectural description languages need to be designed to increase their usability, acceptability, and consequently analyzability.