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.