NOSA'98 : Proceedings of the First Nordic Workshop on Software Architecture

Software architecture research is receiving increased amounts of attention in academia as well as in industry. Therefore, in 1997 the initiative was taken by the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby to start a network of academic and industrial partners, SARIS, interested in various aspects of software architecture. The intention of the SARIS (Software Architecture Research in Sweden) network is to bring together partners with common interests, exchange experiences through the mailing list and regular meetings and to develop cooperation wherever possible. The term software architecture is somewhat overloaded, but most experts agree that it primarily refers to the top-level decomposition of a system into its main components and the interaction between these components. A second aspect is that software architecture design is primarily concerned with the non-functional requirements (also properties or quality attributes) of software systems, rather than their functionality. Attributes can be categorized into operational attributes, such as efficiency, reliability, robustness and cor-rectness, and development attributes, such as maintainability, flexibility and reusability. The architecture structures the functionality required from a system such that the non-functional requirements are fulfilled