Dynamic distributed software architecture design with PARSE-DAT

SoftArch/MTE: Generating Distributed System Test-Beds from High-Level Software Architecture Descriptions

“…In order to avoid having to build continuously evolving performance test bed prototypes a number of architecture and middleware performance simulation and modelling methods and tools have been developed [1,9,7,18,27,24,29,36]. These make it easier for architects to express and explore likely architecture performance by providing higher-level models of architectures and using these to produce simulated or computed performance estimates for the models.…”

“…These range from static architecture modelling approaches usually focusing on structure and to a lesser degree behaviour [31,20,23,25] to dynamic architecture visualisation and metrics analysis [8,36,24,11]. We chose to use our SoftArch architecture modelling and analysis tool in this research as it provides a mix of both static (structure and behaviour modelling) and dynamic (performance and other architecture metric visualisation) support facilities within one integrated environment [12].…”

“…In order to enable developers to get a more accurate assessment of architectural design decisions various approaches have been developed to validate architectural designs. These include architecture-based simulation and modelling [4,24,36], performance prototypes [19,10,17], and performance monitoring and visualisation of similar, existing systems [4,34]. Simulation of architecture and middleware performance tends by its very nature to be more or less inaccurate, giving results of limited usefulness.…”

A framework for visual notation exchange

“…call-graphs and control flow [1,20,27], message sequencing [30,24,31,4]; dynamic architectures [14,24]; and various run-time software characteristics like performance and resource utilisation [14,27]. Many tools have been developed to support variants of these visualisation notations, for example UML-based CASE tools [26,30], software architecture design and analysis tools [9,24,15], graph visualisation tools [11,18,20], program analysis and visualisation tools [3,24,27] and visual language tools [13,31].…”

Generation of distributed system test-beds from high-level software architecture descriptions

“…Architects often make such decisions based on their prior knowledge and experience. Various approaches exist to validating these architectural design decisions, such as architecture-based simulation and modelling [3,14,23], performance prototypes [12,6,11], and performance monitoring and visualisation of similar, existing systems [3,21]. However, simulation tends to be rather inaccurate, performance prototypes require considerable effort to build and evolve, and existing system performance monitoring requires close similarity and, very often, considerable modification effort to gain useful results.…”