A consistent way of developing object oriented designs from component and connector architectures

Abstract

Some practitioners use object-oriented design itself as the architecture of the system instead of using the emerging architectural tools and concepts. Although some Object Oriented Development (OOD) concepts can be used to address some architectural design issues, and doing so is popular among software developers, there are significant differences between the capabilities and benefits of Object Oriented (OO) approaches to design and the approaches provided by the emerging software architecture design tools and notations. The level of abstraction that the OO design paradigm provides does not cover all the areas required for architectural design. In this thesis, a systematic method of developing a detail OO design from an architectural design that is consistent with the component and connector architecture is proposed. In this method, intermediate modeling between the architecture modeling and the modeling with class diagrams or sequence diagrams is used to narrow the gap between the two widely different abstraction levels of the architecture model and the detail design model. Once a CCA is designed, candidate classes and their relationships are identified per each architectural element. Finally in order to verify that this approach is effective, it is checked that quality attributes supported by the CCA are equally maintained by the detail design through tracing the attributes from the CCA to the detail design.