NSF Young Investigator: Towards An Engineering Basis for Software Architecture

软件工程的一个重要目标是在抽象的体系结构级别上描述复杂的软件系统。尽管体系结构设计一直是决定软件系统成功与否的主要因素，但体系结构描述通常只能以非正式、惯用的方式来理解。由于这种非正式性，体系结构设计通常不能很好地集成到软件开发环境中，而是看起来(如果有的话)是系统的确证高级文档。这项研究以两种互补的方式将建筑设计置于更坚实的基础上。首先，它为关于建筑设计的描述和推理提供了正式的基础。这就产生了用于检查体系结构设计是否格式良好的规则，其方式类似于现有实现语言的类型检查。其次，它提供了开发特定于风格的建筑设计环境的工具。这些工具提供了经济高效的方法来生成为特定应用程序系列的架构设计量身定做的新环境。这笔赠款包括本科生研究经验(REU)计划下的支持。

An important goal in software engineering is to describe complex software systems at an architectural level of abstraction. While architectural design has always been a major factor in determining the success of a software system, architectural descriptions are typically understood only in informal, idiomatic ways. Because of this informality architectural designs are typically not well-integrated into the software development environments, but appear (if at all) as corroborative high-level documentation for a system. This research places architectural design on a more solid footing in two complementary ways. First, it provides a formal basis for describing and reasoning about architectural designs. This leads to rules for checking whether architectural designs are well-formed in a way that is analogous to type checking for existing implementation languages. Second, it provides tools for developing style-specific architectural design environments. These tools provide cost-effective ways to generate new environments tailored to the architectural design of specific application families. This grant includes support under the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program.