Integrated Software Architecture Management and Validation

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.