Declaratively codifying software architectures using virtual software classifications

Most current day software engineering tools and environments do not sufficiently support software engineers to declare or to enforce the intended software architecture. Architectures are typically described at a too low level, inhibiting their evolution and understanding. Furthermore, most tools provide little support to verify automatically whether the source code conforms to the architecture. Therefore, a formalism is needed in which architectures can be expressed at a sufficiently abstract level, without losing the ability to perform conformance checking automatically. We propose to codify declaratively software architectures using virtual software classifications and relationships among these classifications. We illustrate how software architectures can be expressed elegantly in terms of these virtual classifications and how to keep them synchronized with the source code.