UML Tool Kit for Software Architecture Modeling and Analysis

Introduction

UML has become a standard that is widely followed and understood in the industry. While UML has established itself in detailed software design, its usage as an alternative to the current architecture description languages has been found somewhat problematic in the industry. In this project, we adopt the concept of UML profiles in architecture design. Architecture profiles are UML profiles that are specialized for software architecture design process and software architecture description. These profiles present an appropriate abstraction level to elaborate the architecture styles and rules. During the project, a general schema for arranging architecture profiles is developed, together with a set of conformance rules for validating architecture design against the profiles. As a result, the project is developing a practical tool (artDECO) for checking and enforcing the conformance rules, integrated with Rational Rose.

The aim of the 2002 project was to develop general infrastructure for UML based software architecture modeling, to be used in a prototype environment that supports modeling, analyzing, communicating, documenting, maintaining, and monitoring of architecture design artifacts. The aim of the 2003 follow-up project is to apply the techniques and tools developed during 2002 on real software architecture models provided by the customer, and use these case studies to validate the ART approach.

The project is financed by, and carried out in a close co-operation with, the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki.