UML+ROOM as a standard ADL?

Abstract

Designing a software system's architecture properly is one of the most important tasks of any software engineering project. Nevertheless there exists no common definition of the term "software architecture" and no standard software architecture description language (ADL). The paper discusses whether the standard OO modeling language UML is a standard ADL, explains some deficiencies if used for this purpose, and makes a proposal of how to eliminate these deficiencies. The proposal is based on the widely accepted idea that elements of the component based OO modeling language, ROOM, should be integrated with UML. It explains why the idea of merging static structure diagrams of ROOM with behaviour-describing collaboration diagrams of UML is not sufficient and presents an additional approach for the integration problem.