Transforming component-connector architecture into UML using XML

Abstract

Architectural DeX-SCRIPTion Language (ADL)s have contributed to capturing, documenting and analyzing architectural structure about software systems for decades. However, practitioners in industry have not recognized the necessity of ADLs due to the following two reasons. Firstly, practitioners do not have much knowledge about how important the deXSCRIPTion of architectural features is. Secondly, ADLs can not be directly used for implementation because ADLs don’t support the industry standards. UML has been used as a de facto standard in industry and UML2.0 provides several new features to support describing architecture. In addition, standard XML schema deX-SCRIPTion is annotated. In this thesis, with the new features of UML2.0 and its XML schema, a process and its associated set of rules to transform a generic architectural description into UML2.0 description are proposed. ACME is used as a generic ADL for this transformation, and a couple of examples are provided to apply these rules. The transformation rules bridge the gap of ADLs and UML, so that architectural deX-SCRIPTion can contribute to practitioner``s community as being transformed to industrial standard, UML. In addition, architectural deX-SCRIPTion XML files transformed by these rules can automatically generate design models regardless of what UML support tools are used for it, when the XML files are imported into those tools. This interoperability and compatibility provide traceability between architectural description and design, so that this traceability contributes to architectural consistency between the architectural deX-SCRIPTion, design, and implementation during over all developing process of a software system.