An evaluation of the software architecture efficiency using the Clichés and behavioral diagrams pertaining to the unified modeling language

• Main Authors: Siamak Khaksar Haghani, Yousef Abbasnejad, Ali Harounabadi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Growing Science 2014-06-01
• Series: Decision Science Letters
• Subjects: Software Architecture; Unified Modeling Language; Efficiency Evaluation; Colored Petri Net
• Online Access: http://www.growingscience.com/dsl/Vol3/dsl_2014_4.pdf
• ISSN: 1929-5804; 1929-5812

The software architecture plays essential role for the development of the complicated software systems and it is important to evaluate the software architecture efficiency. One way to evaluate the software architecture is to create an executable model from the architecture. Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams are used to describe the software architecture. UML has made it easy to use and to evaluate the necessary requirements at the software architecture level. It creates an executable model from these diagrams; yet, since the UML is a standard semi-formal language for describing the software architecture, evaluating the software architecture is not directly possible through it. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the software architecture, one needs to turn the actual model into the formal model. In this study, first we describe the architecture using the UML. Then, some properties of the software architecture are mentioned using the UML sequence diagram, deployment diagram, use case diagram, and component diagram. The necessary information associated with the qualitative characteristic of efficiency will be margined as clichés and labels to these diagrams. The independent and dependent components will be extracted from the component diagram. Finally, the resulted semi-formal model will be mapped into a formal model based on the colored Petri net and finally the evaluation will take place.