ABC: supporting software architectures in the whole lifecycle

How to compose prefabricated components is a key issue in component-based reuse. Research on Software Architecture (SA) and Component based Software Development (CBSD) provides two hopeful solutions from different perspectives. SA provides a top-down approach to realizing component-based reuse, but doesn’t pay enough attention to the refinement and implementation of the architectural descriptions, thus not fully able to automate the transformation or composition to form an executable application. CBSD provides a bottom-up way by using existing middleware infrastructures, but this technology is not able to guide systematically the CBSD process, especially the component composition at higher abstract levels. Naturally, a promising solution is to combine the above