Multi-view description of software architectures

The specification of a software architecture using different ADLs allows system designers to carry out a number of complementary analyses. In this position paper, we go one step further in this direction by advocating the need for specifying distinct views of a software architecture, each characterizing a specific type of properties (i.e. functional, interaction, and quality properties). Multi-view description of a software architecture raises the issue of combining a set of architectural views so as to derive the resulting overall architecture. We propose some hints on how this can be handled.