Enhancing Software Architecture Behavior Understanding and Extensibility by Multi-view Metamodeling

Component based development is recognized now as a powerful tool to manage actual systems´ technological complexity. The success key factor of this discipline is the high level abstracting of systems´ structural and behavioral constituents. On the other hand, enhancing software architectures simplicity and clarity by separating several concerns is a useful technique to manage complexity. In order to have a complete system specification, a rigorous behavior description is needed. Behavioral concepts and their use in architectural specification are in a fast evolution and have become so numerous, so it becomes difficult to elicit and manage them. For these purposes, we present in this paper, a generalized metamodel of behavioral aspects, that indexes the various architectural behavior concepts in classes, in a generic way. To enable more sophisticated and consistent analysis of architecture behavior we have separated behavioral concepts into packages basing on four functional perspectives: interface, static behavior, dynamic behavior, and interaction protocols. We show that our proposed metamodel allows having a general, a unified and an adaptable view of behavioral concepts required in software architecture description from all functional viewpoints.