Towards Assurance-Driven Architectural Decomposition of Software Systems
This addresses the problem of assurance tool integration for software developers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing abstraction and decomposition concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating diverse software quality assurance techniques into the software development lifecycle by proposing a 4-dimensional meta-architecture that separates computational, coordination, and stateful artifacts early in design, demonstrated on a simple file system.
Computer systems are so complex, so they are usually designed and analyzed in terms of layers of abstraction. Complexity is still a challenge facing logical reasoning tools that are used to find software design flaws and implementation bugs. Abstraction is also a common technique for scaling those tools to more complex systems. However, the abstractions used in the design phase of systems are in many cases different from those used for assurance. In this paper we argue that different software quality assurance techniques operate on different aspects of software systems. To facilitate assurance, and for a smooth integration of assurance tools into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), we present a 4-dimensional meta-architecture that separates computational, coordination, and stateful software artifacts early on in the design stage. We enumerate some of the design and assurance challenges that can be addressed by this meta-architecture, and demonstrate it on the high-level design of a simple file system.