About
What is SafArchie Studio ?
SafArchie Studio is a set of modules for ArgoUML. It transforms ArgoUML into an IDE for software architectures.
SafArchie studio uses seven modules linked together for modelling:
- Software architecture types,
- Logical software architectures,
- Physical architectures,
- Technical concern architectures
- Integration rules of a concern (adaptor)
- Weaving rules for integrating one technical concern into a software architecture
The last modules allows the supervising of software architectures at runtime.
The software architecture description can be used as a blueprint for code generation. There is a
projection onto Fractal.
SafArchie Studio is the implantation of the research work done by Olivier Barais for his PhD's thesis. This
thesis took place in the Jacquard INRIA project.
Overview of the thesis
Software architecture specification
SafArchie provides a language and a set of tools
for describing software architecture. In SafArchie, we argue that, in
order to accrue the true benefits of software architecture approaches,
one may need to use an architecture centric approach with a global
reasoning: from software architecture design to software architecture
management to software architecture building, deployment and
refinement. However some degree of consistency must be preserved
between these different steps of the software life cycle. For this
reason, we have based our approach on the notion of architecture types
that are points of reference at each step of our reasoning. We offer
with SafArchie Studio, a first architecture centric approach which is based on a
three-view perspective and driven by the component life cycle.
Software architecture evolution
The SafArchie approach serves as the building
blocks of an other project named TranSAT (Transformation of Software
ArchiTecture). Indeed, most of the time, software architecture models
do not allow new software system features to be added or modified. Thus
adding new concerns in a software architecture is difficult and often
requires lots of efforts from the architect. Furthermore, the current
software architecture models do not provide any means to describe,
save, or analyze integration rules of technical concern. TranSAT
addresses these lacks of software architecture models. It proposes a
framework for designing software architecture through step by step
refinements: From an architecture that contains only business concerns
to a global architecture that contains business and technical concerns.
The main idea of this project is inspired by the Aspect Oriented
Software Development (AOSD) concepts.
TranSAT provides three main features:
- It defines a mechanism to add new concerns to a software architecture specification.
- It provides a description model for software architecture, which records the integration rules of a specific concern.
- It specifies rules, which guarantee the correct integration of a technical concern into a business model.
Associated with TranSAT, SafArchie provides an architecture centric approach to build consistent
software step by step.
