A software architecture is an abstraction of a software system, which is indispensable for many software engineering tasks. Unfortunately, in many cases architectural information is not available, outdated, or inappropriate for the task at hand. Software architecture reconstruction concerns obtaining architectural information from an existing system. Currently, this process is unstructured, req...

The design of software systems and the models describing it are usually constrained by the intended software architecture. The intended software architecture defines, for example, how components may be grouped or how they may interact. For the sake of maintenance, evolvability, and smooth operation of software systems, it is of great importance to check and guarantee the architectural complianc...

Architects deal with shapes all the time in a variety of ways. Shapes in architectural practice are understood as an interesting blend of abstract geometrical forms and their possible or actual material realisations. These entities can even be identified with a real place, a place where people live, which then acquires this mixed nature as well. Thus, architectural shapes and places are not abs...

This work presents an exploratory study whose goal was to investigate the architectural characteristics of Android’s applications. We selected twelve popular and open-source applications available on the official Android’s store for analysing. Then, we applied techniques of the reverse engineering to each target application in order to investigate three main aspects: (i) architecture of each ap...

A significant driver for lowering life-cycle cost and cycle time is the ability to make good design decisions early. Building virtual prototypes, which enable analysis of the impact of decisions, is an effective way to do this. However, virtual prototypes have to support the product's representation as well as its behavior. Building virtual prototypes of complex systems being designed by a mult...

BSPlab is a simulation environment for studying the interplay between hardware and software in parallel computing. It offers the BSPlib parallel programming library and is based on Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) computing [1], [2]. BSPlab contains a set of high-level performance models of parallel architectures. It can be used as a tool for architectural level design space exploration of BSP c...

This paper discusses dynamic reconfiguration of applications at the architectural level. Current work on dynamic aspects of software architectures has focused on planned reconfigurations controlled from the outside. In this paper we present a different approach, using architectural agents. The agent-enabled architecture descriptions will be executable and have a mechanism to describe reconfigur...

Service-oriented architecture is a recent conceptual framework for service-oriented software platforms. Architectures are of great importance for the evolution of software systems. We present a modelling and transformation technique for service-centric distributed software systems. Architectural configurations, expressed through hierarchical architectural patterns, form the core of a specificat...

We develop a notion of higher-order connector towards supporting the systematic construction of architectural connectors for software design. The idea is that individual properties of connectors, such as security and fault-tolerance, can be designed separately as higher-order connectors. Complex connectors can then be described as suitable combinations of high-order connectors and basic connect...