Towards Formalized Software Architecture

Robert Allen, and David Garlan

Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-92-163, July 1992.

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Abstract

An important goal in software engineering is to describe complex software systems at an architectural level of abstraction. While there are many useful architectural paradigms (pipes, blackboards, etc.) they are typically understood only idiomatically and applied in an ad hoc fashion. We show how a formal model allows us to say precisely what we mean by a software architecture, explore its properties, and systematically describe instances of the architecture. We illustrate the approach using the well-known example of pipe-filter architectures.

Keywords

Dataflow Systems, Pipes and Filters, Software Architecture, Software Engineering, Software Design, Formal Specification

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