Designing logical architectures of software systems

Abstract

It is commonly agreed that architectural design is essential for successful development of complicated software and architectural design can most effectively serve its purpose by utilizing multiple views of software architecture. Logical view is the earliest and foremost view that software developers should consider because it shapes later phase of architecture design and subsequent development. In this thesis, we present an architecture description language and an associated design method for the logical architecture. In order to do that, we first clarify the notion of logical view and determine its goals. On this foundation a description language and a method for logical architectures are developed. The advantages of the proposed logical architecture description language are that it is the tailored architecture description language for the logical view and easy for developers to follow it up by supporting top-down decomposition, and the advantages of the proposed logical architecture design method are its clear goals and guidelines for developers. We show the efficacy of the language and the design method by working out an application example.