CAREER: Lightweight Modeling and Enforcement of Architectural Behavior

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

CCF-0546550 Jonathan Aldrich Carnegie Mellon University CAREER: Lightweight Modeling and Enforcement of Architectural Behavior Building and evolving large software systems is one of the biggest challenges facing software engineers today. One approach to dealing with the complexity of a software system is to study its software architecture, the high-level organization of a software system. This research is developing lightweight techniques for modeling software architecture and for enforcing architecture in code. The core approach is a new formal modeling framework for software architectures that can express arbitrary dynamism in the design, yet also abstraction and composition mechanisms that allow the designs to scale. The framework is grounded in formal semantics that define how dynamic architectural models can be simulated and analyzed. In order to increase the impact of software architecture in practice, the project is developing new techniques for mapping from arbitrary object-oriented implementation code to a high-level architectural design, using unobtrusive program annotations sprinkled throughout the source code. These annotations are used by novel program analysis techniques to verify that the code conforms to the structure of the architectural design, ensuring that engineers achieve the benefits of their architectural design in practice. The project is validating these techniques through case studies, and is achieving impact through open source software, commercialization, and educational outreach.