On Relating Functional Specifications to Architectural Specifications: A Case Study ; CU-CS-933-02

Software architecture specifications are predominantly concerned with describing thecomponent structure of systems and how the components interact behaviorally. Littleattention has been paid to formally relating those specifications to higher levels of speci-fication, such as the system requirements. In this paper we present our progress towardaddressing an instance of this problem, namely relating state-based software architecturespecifications to high-level functional specifications. Our approach is to use an interme-diate specification given in terms of a set of temporal logic properties to bridge the gapbetween the two levels of specifications. We describe our approach in the context of aparticular case study, the AEGIS GeoServer Simulation Testbed system, showing howa compact functional specification of a critical behavioral property of the system can beused to validate three alternative architectural specifications of that system.