Architecture-centered Integrated Verification Architecture-centered Integrated Verification

This chapter presents an architecture-centered verification approach to large scale complex software systems by integrating model checking with runtime verification. A software architecture design provides a high-level abstraction of system topology, functionality, and/or behavior, which provides a basis for system understanding and analysis as well as a foundation for subsequent detailed design and implementation. Therefore, software architecture plays a critical role in the software development process. Reasoning and analysis of software architecture model can detect errors in an early stage, further reduce the errors in the final product and highly improve the software quality. First identified are the two main streams of software architecture research groups–the groups that work on the architectural abstraction and semantic foundation, and the group works on the framework using object oriented concepts. Problematically, both architecture designs cannot generate correct products due to two reasons. On one hand, not all properties can be verified at design level because of the state space explosion problem, verification costs, and characteristics of open-system. On the other hand, a correct and valid software architecture design does not ensure a correct implementation due to the error-prone characteristics of the software development process.