Architectural mismatches are a recognized obstacle to successful software reuse. An architectural mismatch occurs when two or more software components are connected to form a system and those components make differing and incompatible assumptions about their interactions or the environment in which they exist. Mismatch detection and avoidance has been previously discussed in existing literature...

We present a novel approach which facilitates formal verification of component-based software application families using model checking. This approach enables effective compositional reasoning by facilitating formulation of component properties and their environment assumptions. This approach integrates bottom-up component verification and top-down system verification based on the concept of ap...

Software architecture (SA) is a crucial component of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), since it eases the communication and reuse of designs and components. However, existing languages (e.g., UML, AADL, SysML) are lacking many needed features. In particular, they provide rudimentary support for connectors, a first-class element in the components and connectors (C&C) architectural view and one of ...

The emerging paradigm of Web services opens a new way of engineering enterprise Web applications via rapidly developing and deploying Web applications, by composing independently published Web service components to conduct new business transactions. However, how to formally validate and reason about the properties of an enterprise system composed of Web service components remains a challenge. T...

In the recent past, architectural languages have begun to introduce so-called connec-tors. Connectors separate communication code from the application-speciic components so that it can be easily exchanged. Unfortunately, however, communication code is usually deeply woven into the components and often has to be replaced when the component is reused in a diierent context. In this paper we show t...

The study of software architectures is emerging as an important discipline in software engineering, due to its emphasis on large scale composition of software products, and its support for emerging software engineering paradigms such as product line engineering, component based software engineering, and software evolution. Architectural attributes differ from code-level software attributes in t...

Security is becoming a more and more important concern for software architecture and software components. Previous modeling approaches provide insufficient support for an indepth treatment of security. This paper argues for a more comprehensive treatment of an important security aspect, access control, at the architecture level. Our approach models security subject, resource, privilege, safegua...

Software component technologies support assembly of systems from binary component implementations that may have been created in isolation from one and another. While these technologies provide assistance in wiring components together, they fail to provide support for predicting the quality attributes of assemblies of components prior to their actual composition. The study of software architectu...

The concept of Location Law was recently put forward for the modelling of architectural aspects of distributed and mobile systems that need to be location-aware. These are systems for which communication and access to resources need to be modelled explicitly at the higher architectural levels of design and cannot be relegated to the lower infrastructural levels: components need to know where th...

Given the advantages of building systems from pre-built and pre-tested components instead of building new ones each time, why then is this not the norm in software engineering? The answer appears to be that building systems this way currently requires a similar amount of effort to building one from scratch. This is because of the work required to successfully integrate components with differing...