Domains of Concern in Software Architectures

Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-code to coarser-grained elements and their interconnection structure. Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed as domain-specific languages for the domain of software architecture. There is still little consensus in the research community on what problems are most important to address in a study of software architecture, what aspects of an architecture should be modeled in an ADL, or even what an ADL is. To shed light on these issues, we provide a framework of architectural domains, or areas of concern in the study of software architectures. We evaluate existing ADLs with respect to the framework and study the relationship between architectural and application domains. One conclusion is that, while the architectural domains perspective enables one to approach architectures and ADLs in a new, more structured manner, further understanding of architectural domains, their tie to application domains, and their specific influence on ADLs is needed.