Enhanced connectors to support hierarchical dependencies in software architecture

Abstract

The more important level of abstraction in the description of large and complex software is its architecture description. So, at this abstraction level we can describe the principal system components and their pathways of interaction. Software architecture is considered to be the driving aspect of the development process; it allows specifying which aspects and models in each level needed according to the software architecture design. Early Architecture Description Languages (ADLs), nearly exclusive, focus on structural abstraction hierarchy ignoring behavioural description hierarchy, conceptual hierarchy, and metamodeling hierarchy. In this paper we show that all those hierarchies constitute views to appropriately "reason about" software architectures described using our C3 metamodel which is a minimal and complete ADL. We provide a set of mechanisms to deal with different levels of each hierarchy; also we introduce a new enhanced definition for connector concept deployed in C3 architectures.