Multi-View Model-Driven Projection to Facilitate the Control of the Evolution and Quality of the Architecture

Abstract

In model driven-engineering, there is a myriad of approaches that use models and transformations to develop software systems. However, a few works in the literature have discussed the simplification of these models to make them more readable, understandable, and easy to navigate. This article proposed an approach that simplifies models in order to assist architects in controlling architecture evolution and quality, especially with large systems. This approach consists of two main concepts, multi-view modeling and on-demand model projection. In the former, formally specified models are divided into two views. The first one is dedicated to describe quality attributes. The second view represents the architectural view. The multi-viewing can enrich stakeholder reasoning about the developed architecture and simplify the mapping between quality attributes and architectural decisions at different abstraction levels. In the latter, the projection concept consists of extracting from source models only elements of interest to generate simpler and narrower models as output.