Software architecture directed behaviour analysis

A Software Architecture is the overall structure of a system in terms of its constituent components and their interconnections. In this paper, we discuss an approach to using architectural description for the behavioural analysis of distributed software systems and some of the issues which arise in providing tool support. The approach is based on the use of finite state automata to specify behaviour and Compositional Reachability Analysis to check composite system models. The architecture description of a system is used directly to generate the model used for analysis.