Rev. Fac. Ing. - Univ. Tarapacá, vol. 13 no. 1, 2005, pp. 69-76

FIVE ONTOLOGICAL LEVELS TO DESCRIBE AND EVALUATE SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES

Hernán Astudillo¹

1 Departamento de Informática, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Avda. España 1680, Valparaíso, Chile, hernan@acm.org

RESUMEN

Los modelos de calidad para la arquitectura del software son taxonomías de atributos de calidad, comúnmente usados para especificar y para evaluar requisitos no funcionales. La mayoría de los modelos de calidad ofrecen un enfoque de dos niveles, que distinguen los atributos externamente observables de los internamente medibles, dando lugar a criterios compuestos de calidad que son específicos a cada stakeholder. Mucho trabajo se ha dedicado a determinar la influencia de los atributos internos sobre los externos, y la mayoría de los modelos usan una jerarquía de dos niveles. Este artículo argüe que este aparente orden dual obscurece el que los requisitos son formulados por diversos stakeholders acerca de sujetos diversos, y que la palabra "arquitectura" significa algo diferente para cada uno de ellos: la organización de un sistema, una descripción de tal organización, y el proceso de elaborar tales descripciones. El esquema propuesto organiza los atributos de arquitectura en cinco niveles ontológicos, que difieren en sus preocupaciones, tipos de usuarios y técnicas de medición disponibles: computaciones, entregables (binarios/configuraciones), software (textos), especificaciones (de la arquitectura y/o del diseño) y proceso de arquitectura.

Palabras clave: Arquitectura de software, especificación de software, calidad, evaluación, ontología de pruebas, computaciones versus diseño.

ABSTRACT

Quality models for software architecture are taxonomies of quality attributes, commonly used to specify and evaluate nonfunctional requirements. Most quality models offer a two-level approach, distinguishing externally observable and internally measurable attributes, yielding stakeholder-specific composite quality criteria. Much effort is devoted to determine which internal attributes influence which external ones, and most models stick to a two-level hierarchy. This paper argues that this apparent dual order obscures the fact that requirements are made by different stakeholder about different subjects, and the word "architecture" means different things to each of them: the organization of a system, a description of such organization, and the process of elaborating such descriptions. The proposed scheme organizes architecture attributes according to five ontological (descriptive) levels, each of them with different concerns, types of users and available measurement techniques: computations, deployables (binaries/configurations), software (texts), specifications (of architecture and/or design), and architecture process. Finally, levels and stakeholders are related to specific architecture views.

Keywords: Software architecture, software specification, quality, evaluation, testing  ontology, computation versus design.

REFERENCES

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Recibido el 8 de abril de 2004, aceptado el 2 de noviembre de 2004