College of Computing Sciences

Reasoning about Software Architecture

We like to think that while the source code of a software product determines its function, its architectural representation determines its non functional attributes.  Despite its imperfections, this view has some appeal.  By virtue of this view, we should be able to reason about the non functional attributes of a software product by analyzing its architecture.  Yet in practice, most (or all?) architectural description languages provide no automated support for the analysis of software products.  Our interest in this project is to derive a theory for reasoning about non functional attributes of software products, and to experiment with automated tools that support this theory.