AFD-An Architectural Language for Integral Modeling

Abstract

Describing architectures of complex software systems using architectural languages is usually done through multiple viewpoints that enable the creation of views. While the creation of views enables the separation of stakeholders’ concerns with the system and eases manageability, it raises the problem of inconsistencies among the views. This paper presents Annotated Functional Decomposition (AFD), an architectural language that provides integral modeling as a possible solution to this problem. Integral modeling creates a model by decomposing a system into its functions, which are annotated to simultaneously create multiple views. Having all created views available in the model at the same time facilitates inconsistency management. AFD supports automated inconsistency detection and manual inconsistency resolution. Moreover, AFD supports the automated translation of views to appropriate UML diagrams, which facilitates adaptation to other methodological approaches. According to the criteria used in the literature for the evaluation of 124 architectural languages, AFD provides nine out of 12 requirements that are important to practitioners.

Keywords

• Architectural language
• viewpoints
• consistency
• integral modeling
• UML