Architecture-level dependence analysis for software systems

The emergence of formal software architecture description languages provides an opportunity to perform analyses at high levels of abstraction, as well as early in the development process. Previous research has primarily focused on developing techniques such as algebraic and transition-system analysis to detect component mismatches or global behavioral incorrectness. In this paper we motivate the utility and describe the challenges in developing a different kind of analysis for use at the architectural level, namely dependence analysis. Various kinds of dependence analyses have been used widely at the implementation level to aid program optimization, anomaly checking, program understanding, testing, and debugging. However, the languages used for architectural description offer quite different features than the languages for which traditional dependence analysis techniques have been developed. We describe our initial approach to architecture-level dependence analysis and illustrate that approach through a prototype tool we have built, called Aladdin, to automatically perform the analysis.