Paving the Road for Formally Defined Architecture Description in Software Development

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.