COSABuilder: an Extensible Tool for Architectural Description

As software systems grow, their complexity augments dramatically. In consequence their understandability and evolvability are becoming a difficult task, therefore a way to describe the architecture of software systems is becoming a must. 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 show how we can build a hybrid model, based on the two approaches, to describe the architecture of software systems. This approach profits from the advantages of the two approaches, i.e. the explicit presentation of functional aspects in object-oriented modeling and the explicit separation of competition (components) from interactions (connectors) in architectural description.