Formal Modeling and Analysis of Software Architecture: Components, Connectors, and Events

Developing a good software architecture for a complex system is a critically important step for insuring that the system will satisfy its principal objectives. Unfortunately, today descriptions of software architecture are largely based on informal “box-and-line” drawings that are often ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent, and unanalyzable. This need not be the case. Over the past decade a number of researchers have developed formal languages and associated analysis tools for software architecture. In this paper I describe a number of the representative results from this body of work.