Reference architecture knowledge representation: an experience

Abstract

Software architectures have played a significant role in determining the success of software systems. In spite of impact of the architectures to the software development and, as a consequence, to the software quality, there is not yet a consensus about which mechanisms work better to describe these architectures. In addition, despite the relevance of reference architectures as an artifact that comprises knowledge of a given domain and supports development of systems for that domain, issues related to their representation have not also had enough attention. In this perspective, this work intends to contribute with an experience of representing reference architectures aiming at easily sharing and reusing knowledge in order to develop software systems. A case study on software testing is presented illustrating our experience.