Genetic Synthesis of Software Architecture

Design of software architecture is intellectually one of the most demanding tasks in software engineering. This paper proposes an approach to automatically synthesize software architecture using genetic algorithms. The technique applies architectural patterns for mutations and quality metrics for evaluating individual architectures, producing a proposal for a software architecture on the basis of functional requirements given as a graph of functional responsibilities. Two quality attributes are considered, modifiability and efficiency. The behavior of the genetic synthesis process is analyzed with respect to quality improvement speed, the effect of population size, the effect of dynamic mutation, and the effect of quality attribute prioritization. It is concluded that genetic architecture synthesis in the proposed form is a converging process that is able to produce reasonable architectural solutions , although fully satisfactory architectures have not been synthesized in our tests for an example system.