Rigorous engineering of software architectures: Integrating ADLs, UML and development methodologies

Architecture engineering is an area that is under construction for being transferred to software engineers. Many results exist from high-level formal and conceptual approaches to basic good practices taken from industrial experiences. Descriptions and methodologies should be at least considered for architecture engineering. Two interesting approaches to architecture description are avail able: Architecture Description Languages (ADL) or modeling languages (especially UML). In the first case, efforts have been made to provide rigorous integrated languages dedicated to architecture engineering but unfortunately these languages are incomplete and not ready for technology transfer. Concerning UML, many approaches use UML models for partial architecture descriptions. In both cases, a few efforts have been made on methodology. This paper presents the current state of the art covering architecture descriptions and development methodologies for architecture engineering. We present a first integrated approach, called FIDJI that tries to take advantage from ADLs, UML, and some development methodologies. FIDJI uses UML for its models, MDA for its layering and ADLs for precision. Concerning methodology, FIDJI follows the HP recommendations and the notion of refinement and contracts taken from formal development methodologies. Finally, we briefly illustrate the use of the FIDJI approach by means of a real web-based distributed application.