Controlling the interactions of architectural design components using scoping rules

Software designers rely on programming language constructs and machine readable system models to specify dependencies between the components of a software system. In large software systems with hundreds of components, the overall system structure, called the software architecture or architectural design, may become obfuscated by the numerous components and their inter-dependencies. For this reason software designers often use informal diagrams to separately describe software architectures.;Although software architecture diagrams communicate important information to developers, the fact that they are informal implies that they may not be interpreted consistently by all developers. Moreover, informal diagrams do not lend themselves to mechanical processing, making the development of tools to detect inconsistencies between architectural diagrams and source code, extremely difficult. Ideally, software designers would have at their disposal formal diagrams for specifying architectural designs and tools for checking the syntax of architectural diagrams as well as the consistency between these diagrams and the implementation source code.;Our work bridges the gap between source code and software architecture by incorporating information about source code components and their inter-dependencies into architectural design diagrams in a formal way. The controlling of dependencies among the source code and architectural design components is done using scoping rules. These scoping rules are specified using ASF (Architectural Scoping Formalism), which uses sets of rules, presented visually, to specify scoping constraints. This visual formalism is convenient for the system designer, easily understood by the practitioner, and can be used to automatically generate checking tools.;We have studied the scoping rules of several programming languages and have specified these rules using ASF. Based on the experience gained from this study. ASF was used to specify alternative scoping rules that are more appropriate for architectural design. These ASF specifications were produced using tools that are part of our prototype environment for architectural design. The prototype is based on our configurable tool integration framework, which supports the specification, visualization, and checking of software architectures.