ACM SIGSOFT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES vol 17 no 4 Oct 1992 Page 40 Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture Alexander L. Wolf Dewayne E. Perry Department of Computer Science AT&T Bell Lab oratories University of Colorado 600 Mountain Avenue Boulder, Colorado 80309 Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974
[email protected] [email protected] c 1989,1991,1992 Dewayne E. Perry and Alexander L. Wolf ABSTRACT more toward integrating designs and the design pro cess into the broader context of the software pro cess and its management. One result of this integration was that The purp ose of this pap er is to build the foundation many of the notations and techniques develop ed for soft- for software architecture. We rst develop an intuition ware design have b een absorb ed by implementation lan- for software architecture by app ealing to several well- guages. Consider, for example, the concept of supp ort- established architectural disciplines. On the basis of ing \programmming-in-the-large". This integration has this intuition, we present a mo del of software architec- tended to blur, if not confuse, the distinction b etween ture that consists of three comp onents: elements, form, design and implementation. and rationale. Elements are either pro cessing, data, or The 1980s also saw great advances in our abilityto connecting elements. Form is de ned in terms of the describ e and analyze software systems. We refer here to prop erties of, and the relationships among, the elements | that is, the constraints on the elements. The ratio- such things as formal descriptive techniques and sophis- nale provides the underlying basis for the architecture in ticated notions of typing that enable us to reason more terms of the system constraints, which most often derive e ectively ab out software systems.