Visual formalisms for configuration management

As reuse of software components becomes more commonplace, being able to understand, manipulate and reason about software system architectures acquires new importance. Although commercial software development environments have addressed many of the issues of con guration management, there is still a need for visual formalisms that can aid in representing and manipulating architectures of software systems. This paper introduces ConForm (Con guration Formalism), a graphical notation for representing con gurations of software systems. Several of the basic concepts of ConForm were inspired by the C/Mesa language [8]; however, ConForm is both language and tool independent. ConForm is notable because it is both a visual and a formal approach to representing software architectures.