DUALLY: Putting in Synergy UML 2.0 and ADLs

Many formal languages to describe software architectures (SA) have been proposed so far, but only very few of them are still supported and used in practical contexts. Many UML profiles and extensions have been provided when UML became a standard, in order to model as much as possible architectural concepts. They allow to specify specific needs, but the effort in creating a sort of unified UML-based language for architectures is still not paying. In fact, since different communities require different information to be put into a diagram, depending on which architectural design aspects should be represented and analyzed, the idea of an unified UML language for SA seems to be not adequate. Building on these considerations, we propose DUALLY, a core set of UML concepts, well suited for SA modeling, together with a framework which provides extensibility mechanisms to adapt the initial notation, in order to meet different needs.