Defining an Architecture with a COTS-AwareSoftware Engineering Process

摘要

The goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper continue to drive softwarernengineering practitioners and researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies thatrnare novel, yet practical. As the size and complexity of systems continues to grow, there has beenrna growing interest in the investigation of social paradigms (e.g., agent- and goal-orientedrnapproaches) and the use of COTS components. These are being viewed more and more asrnpromising, and also perhaps inevitable, solutions to this problem. The effective application ofrnsocial paradigms and use of COTS components, however, requires a systematic approach thatrnprovides a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter, a set of guidelines for using suchrnconcepts, and tool support to assist the developer.rnIn this paper, we present part of a COTS-Aware Requirements Engineering and Architectingrn(CAREA) approach that explicitly supports the use of COTS components. Our CAREArnapproach, an extension of our previous work in system and software requirements engineering, isrnagent- and goal-oriented, knowledge based, and has a defined process. In particular, we presentrnpart of the process that supports the formal definition of a software architecture. Our CAREArnapproach is validated using a Digital Library System example; a prototype of the CAREArnAssistant tool is used to present some of our preliminary results.