Software architecture-based analysis and testing: a look into achievements and future challenges

The term software architecture (SA) has been introduced to denote the high level structure of a software system. SA has been proposed as a means for managing complexity and improving reuse, by supporting the decomposition of a system into its high level components and their interconnections. SA became prevalent in the beginning of the ’90s when its main role was to describe the system structure (by identifying architectural components and connectors) and the required system behavior. Over the years, the SA scope has evolved, and today it also captures the architecturally-relevant decisions behind design [50] taken by a variety of stakeholders to satisfy their own specific concerns, and codified into different views and viewpoints [46]. Nowadays, the relevance of SA in both academic and industrial worlds is unquestionable, and SAs are used for documenting and communicating design decisions and architectural solutions [24], for driving analysis techniques [57,62,63,79], for code generation purposes in model-driven engineering [3,37], for product line engineering [15], for risks and cost estimation [36,67], and further on. SAs have also been advocated since the 1990s as a means for improving the dependability of complex software systems. In this light, different methods have been

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