Towards a well-formed software architecture analysis

Over the past decade Software Architecture has proved to be a core component in software development processes. Therefore, the correctness of the software architecture is unsurprisingly crucial for the success of software products. Many methods for analyzing software architecture have been proposed in the literature in order to predict potential risks that impose far-reaching effects on the final product. However, almost none of these methods have been adopted in the industry as many of them require special knowledge or are simply not intuitive enough for the software developer. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing (the first step of) a framework for analyzing software architecture that is built using a semi-formal architecture description language (ADL), and a constraint based relational model. Architecture instances following our approach are then analyzed against a set of properties such as whether the architecture is complete, self-sufficient and self-contained. Satisfying these properties yields a well-formed architecture.