Institutionen för datavetenskap Department of Computer and Information Science Final thesis Investigating Architecture Description Languages ( ADLs ) A Systematic Literature Review

Context: Over the last two decades, software architecture has introduced a new trend in software development. This new trend has completely changed the normal methods and practices of software engineering. The focus has become the architectural elements rather than code and sub-routines. Architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed for this kind of architecture based software development. There are a number of different ADLs both in academia and industry; they are not totally adopted by the software engineering community, but they are not avoided either. In this research work, an investigation has been performed based on the ADLs evaluation in practice. Objectives: The main aim of this study is to investigate evaluation of ADLs in academia and industry. To explore the benefits and drawbacks of ADLs in practice. The study also explores the different quality factors improved by ADLs. Further different methods used to build architecture with ADLs and then how to use architecture described with an ADL in software development and maintenance have also been reported. Methods: This research study has been carried out using the systematic literature review method. The systematic literature review follows the guidelines suggested by Kitchenham [21]. Results: This research review has resulted in total of 102 different ADLs. It has been found that out of the 102 different ADLs, 69 ADLs have been evaluated in academia and only 33 ADLs have been evaluated in industry. ADLs have also been classified based on their industrial and academia evaluation. There are total 31 different benefits and 19 different drawbacks of ADLs have been identified. This review also extracted 20 different quality factors from literature that are improved by using ADLs in practice. Further 13 different methods used to build architecture with ADL have also been reported. Finally 9 different methods of ADLs used in software development and maintenance have been identified. Conclusions: The Large number of ADLs with little evaluation in industry suggests that more work needs to be done in order to improve ADLs evaluation in practice. ADLs provide more benefits compared to their drawbacks which suggests that ADLs can be very beneficial. Knowledge gained during this research study, suggests that ADLs are mostly unrecognized. More awareness about ADLs should be provided in education and practice.