COSA: An architectural description meta-model

As software systems grow, their complexity augments dramatically. In consequence their understandability and evolvability are becoming a difficult task. To cope with this complexity, sophisticated approaches are needed to describe the architecture of these systems. Architectural description is much more visible as an important and explicit analysis design activity in software development. The architecture of a software system can be described using either an architecture description language (ADL) or an object-oriented modeling language. In this article, we present a hybrid model, based on the two approaches, to describe the architecture of software systems. The principal contribution of this approach is, on the one hand to extend ADLs with object-oriented concepts and mechanisms, and on the other hand to describe connectors as entities of first class that can treat the complex dependences among components.