Towards explicit representation of architectural design assumptions

Architecture description languages (ADLs) are means to specify software architectures. During the last few years, a number of ADLs addressed structural aspects of software systems. However, constructing architecture descriptions (ADs) requires specific types of domain knowledge and introduces specific restrictions on the problems to be solved. Such requirements and restrictions play a key role in specifying, reusing and evolving ADs, in acquiring domain knowledge, and in defining the problems to be tackled by the software systems. We discuss the different roles that assumptions play in architecture-centered software development and we derive the requirements for capturing them as part of an ADL. We show how such requirements introduce bias for ADL formalisms.