Software Architecture Slicing

This paper introduces a new form of slicing, named architectural slicing, to aid architectural understanding and reuse. 1 Introduction Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical design level for software systems [5]. The software architecture of a system defines its high-level structure, exposing its gross organization as a collection of interacting components. A well-defined architecture allows an engineer to reason about system properties at a high level of abstraction. Architectural description languages (ADLs) are formal languages that can be used to represent the architecture of a software system. They focus on the high-level structure of the overall application rather than the implementation details of any specific source module. As software architecture design resources (in the form of architectural descriptions) are going to be accumulated, the development of techniques to support understanding, testing, reengineering, maintaining, and reusing of ..