Heuristics for the transition from analysis to software architecture

Abstract

To our knowledge, no current software development methodology explicitly describes how to transit between the different development stages it proposes. This is more evident in the transition from the analysis stage to the software architecture of the application. This paper presents the first semiautomatic method to derive the software architecture of a system from its analysis. The proposal is a set of heuristics that, when applied to the analysis artifacts, generate the software architecture of the application. This proposal has several benefits: (1) the software architecture of the system is directly derived by applying the heuristics; (2) there is a direct trace relationship between the analysis artifacts and the elements of the resulting architecture, which eases the system maintenance.