| Many software projects suffer from problems related to non-existent,
incomplete, inaccurate, or invalid architecture descriptions. The hypothesis underlying
our approach is that architecture related activities, notations, and artifacts are not
integrated well enough with the development process, with the development tools and, in
particular, with the implementation of a software system. We present an approach in
which we emphasize the architectural description of a system as a central element during
the whole software development process. The main idea is to incorporate a formalized
architecture description model into a software system which is always kept up-to-date
during software development. A toolkit, which is based on the model, is used for
continuously defining, validating, visualizing and evolving the architecture during
development. |