An overview of software architecture description language and evaluation method

Abstract

Software architectures shift the focus of developers from lines-of-code to coarser-grained architectural elements and their overall interconnection structure. Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed as modeling notations to support architecture-based development. And a large amount of evaluation methods have been proposed since people concentrated more on the quality of the software. The aim of the software architecture evaluation is to analyzing and finding the potential risks in the architecture. There is, however, little consensus in the research community on what is an ADL's advantage and shortcoming, what are the features of each evaluation methods, and what are the differences between different ADL/ evaluation methods. This paper attempts to provide an answer to these questions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.