Architectural synthesis: integrating multiple architectural perspectives

Many tools and techniques are available to help understand and analyze a system at the architectural level. Each of these provides its own perspective of the key architectural elements of the system. We introduce the process of architectural synthesis to deal with the problem of integrating these different architectural perspectives. The four steps of the synthesis process form an iterative cycle and include acquiring different perspectives (extraction), grouping related perspectives (classification), combining all perspectives that apply to the same architectural view (union), and finally composing views to determine consistency (fusion). We apply the synthesis process to the architecture of a software visualization tool. Our preliminary investigation shows that synthesized architectural perspectives provide a more complete and consistent representation of a real system. We conclude with directions for future research in this area.