First, architecture defines elements. The architecture embodies information about how the elements relate to each other. This means that architecture specifically omits certain information about elements that does not pertain to their interaction. Thus, an architecture is foremost an abstraction of a system that suppresses details of elements that do not affect how they use, are used by, relate...

Performance is determined by a system’s resources and its workload. Some of the resources are software resources which are embedded in the software architecture; some of them are even created by the software behaviour. This paper describes software resources and resource architecture, and shows how resource architecture can be determined from software architecture and behaviour. It considers ho...

A key element to designing software architectures of good quality is the systematic handling of contradicting quality requirements and the structuring principles that support them. The theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) by Altshuller offers tools that can be used to define such a systematic way. This paper describes the idea and preliminary results of using inventive principles and the ...

Natural language processing systems pose a unique challenge for software architectural design as system complexity has increased continually and systems cannot be easily constructed from loosely coupled modules. Lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of linguistic information are tightly coupled in a manner that requires separation of concerns in a special way in design, implementa...

In this paper we present SAABNet (Software Architecture Assessment Belief network), an approach to automating the process of performing software architecture assessment. We have found that SAABNet is especially useful early in the development process when measurable assets are scarce. In this stage of development software architects have little more than their own experience to rely on. SAABNet...

Safety critical systems are growing more complex. To keep these systems safe, methods and techniques are necessary to prevent accidents from happening. Earlier when the engineered systems were smaller and the possibility for large scale destruction was not there, we had the luxury of being in a position to learn from experience. Due to the catastrophes safety critical systems can cause today, w...

Software architecture is a recognized and indispensable part of system development. Software architecture is often defined in terms of components and connectors, or the ”high-level conception of a system”. In recent years, there has been an awareness that not only the design itself is important to capture, but also the knowledge that has led to this design. This so-called architectural knowledg...

Dependable systems are characterized by a number of attributes including: reliability, availability, safety and security. For some attributes (namely for reliability, availability, safety), there exist probability-based theoretic foundations, enabling the application of dependability analysis techniques. The goal of dependability analysis is to forecast the values of dependability attributes, b...

This paper is a retrospective arising from a WCRE paper published in 1998 promoting a relational approach to manipulate software architecture and to help solve various problems in software analysis. That paper explains how Tarski’s binary relational algebra, embedded in a language such as Grok, can solve such problems. Tarski’s notation is elegant and often efficiently executable when the subje...

Web services have received widespread attention and acceptance in the software engineering community. Automatic composition of services, to meet user’s requirements, is a powerful mechanism to ensure satisfaction of varied needs and thus enable the vision of Web services. Although Web services are equipped with the fundamental concepts and supporting technologies, the architectural style of the...