Modelling and Extracting the BuildTime Software Architecture View Abstract.pdfVIP

Modelling and Extracting the Build-Time Software Architecture View Qiang Tu, Michael W. Godfrey, and Xinyi Dong Software Architecture Group (SWAG) School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo email: qtu,migod,xdong
@swag.uwaterloo.ca Abstract The structure of the rest of this paper is as follows: Sec- tion 2 explores the need for the explicit modelling of build- Large software systems often have complex subparts that en- time architectural properties: it summarizes previous defi- gage in subtle relationships with the underlying technologies nitions of software architecture and taxonomies of architec- fr om which they are built. Consequently, many such systems tural views; it introduces the idea of build-time architectural have complex and interesting architectural pr operties that views; it outlines some of the common activities performed can only be understood in the context of the various phases at build-time and the reasons behind them; and it discusses of system construction. We consider that modelling and ex- the relationship between build-time views and configuration tracting build-time architectural views of such systems are and build management. Section 3 introduces a visual nota- key to the software comprehension pr ocess. In this paper, tion for modelling build-time views, and presents three de- we explore the notion of build-time architectural views and tailed examples of systems that have interesting build-time their relationship to well-known taxonomies of software ar- architectural views: the GCC compiler suite, the Perl lan- chitecture vie