A Coordination Perspective on Software System Design

In large software systems the identification and p roper management of interdependencies among the pieces of a system becomes a ce ntral concern. Nevertheless, most traditional programming languages and tools focus on representing components, leaving the description and management of interdependencies among components implicit, or distributed among the c omponents. This paper identifies a number of problems with this approach and proposes a new perspective for designing software, which elevates the representation and management of component interdependencies to a distinct design problem. A core element of the perspective is the development of design handbooks, which catalogue the most common k inds of interconnection relationships encountered in software systems, as well as sets of alternative coordination protocols for managing them. The paper presents SYNTHESIS, a software development environment based o n this perspective. A number of experiments performed using SYNTHESIS as well as s ome directions for future research are discussed.