A Graphical Description Technique for Communication in Software Architectures

A crucial aspect of the architecture of a software system is its decomposition into components and the specification of component interactions. In this paper we use an enhanced variant of Extended Event Traces [SHB96] as a graphical technique for the description of such component interactions. It allows us to define interaction patterns that occur frequently within an architecture, in the form of diagrams. The diagrams may be instantiated in various contexts, thus allowing reuse of interaction patterns. We present several examples to show the applicability of our notation. In addition, we provide a formal semantics for our graphical notation, based on sets of traces. Furthermore, we compare our approach to connector specifications in WRIGHT [AG94], another description language for component interaction in software architectures.     «

A crucial aspect of the architecture of a software system is its decomposition into components and the specification of component interactions. In this paper we use an enhanced variant of Extended Event Traces [SHB96] as a graphical technique for the description of such component interactions. It allows us to define interaction patterns that occur frequently within an architecture, in the form of diagrams. The diagrams may be instantiated in various contexts, thus allowing reuse of interaction p...     »