Using Dependence Analysis to Support Software Architecture Understanding

Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical design level for software systems. As software architecture design resources (in the form of architectural descriptions) are going to be accumulated, the development of techniques and tools to support architectural understanding, testing, reengineering, maintaining, and reusing will become an important issue. In this paper we introduce a new dependence analysis technique, named architectural dependence analysis to support software architecture development. In contrast to traditional dependence analysis, architectural dependence analysis is designed to operate on an architectural description of a software system, rather than the source code of a conventional program. Architectural dependence analysis provides knowledge of dependences for the high-level architecture of a software system, rather than the low-level implementation details of a conventional program.