Requirements and Design for a Domain-Specific Software Architecture Software Design Environment

A Domain-Specific Software Architecture (DSSA) is an architecture template for a family of software systems. The members of such a family of software systems are located in the same problem space - the domain. A domain-specific software architecture consists of a description of the domain - the domain model - , the reference requirements that define a mapping from the domain model to a reference architecture; the latter describes the structure of the solution space. The domain-specific software architecture is a mechanism used to define and map the common problem space to the solution space of the domain. The goal of this thesis is the development of the requirements and an initial design of a domain- specific software architecture environment used for the specification and documentation of DSSAs. To capture arbitrary DSSAs, a general domain model notation is presented. A method and notation used to describe the commonalities and differences among the members of a family of systems in the solution space is introduced. The requirements for the environment are defined using a description of its utilization process. To illustrate the approach, a DSSA for the domain of report writing is presented