| Informal and formal approaches to documenting software architecture design
offer disjoint advantages and disadvantages. Informal approaches are often used in
practice since they are easily accessible and support creativity and flexibility during
design. But they are hard to maintain and validate. This is the strength of formally
defined approaches, which can be automatically processed, maintained and validated,
but are expensive to use. Combining the advantages of both approaches promises to
increase the reach of formal approaches and to make the aforementioned advantages
more accessible. We present an approach that offers a seamless transition from relaxed
and informal architecture descriptions to a detailed and formally defined architecture
definition. |