Logic-Based Software Project Decomposition

Prevailing design modeling techniques are not designed to generally model decisions made throughout software lifecycle, nor to support automatic modularity analysis. We have developed an analyzable design representation called an augmented constraint network (ACN), and an algorithm to decompose a big ACN model into smaller subACNs. To evaluate the effectiveness of the decomposition algorithm in terms of enabling parallel implementation and the feasibility of modeling and analyzing software decisions made in practice using our framework, we apply our techniques to an online student society financial management project. Among other results, the experiment shows that (1) our framework is general enough to uniformly model decisions made within different project stages, such as requirement analysis and architecture design; (2) each sub-ACN, automatically decomposed using our prototype tool, Simon, corresponds to an independent responsibility assignment that can be implemented in parallel; and (3) our approach supports automatic traceability and change impact analysis.