Supporting the Specification and Serialization of Planned Architectures in Architecture-Driven Modernization Context

Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) intends to standardize software reengineering by relying on a family of standard metamodels. Knowledge-Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is the main ADM ISO metamodel aiming at representing all aspects of existing legacy systems. One of the internal KDM metamodels is called Structure, responsible for representing architectural abstractions (Layers, Components and Subsystems) and their relationships. Planned Architecture (PA) is an artifact that involves not only the architectural abstractions of the system but also the access rules that must exist between them and be maintained over time. Although PAs are frequently used in Architecture-Conformance Checking processes, up to this moment, there is no contribution showing how to specify and serialize PAs in ADM-based modernization projects. Therefore, in this paper we present an approach that i) involves a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for the specification of PAs using the Structure metamodel concepts, and ii) proposes a strategy for the serialization of PAs as a Structure metamodel instance without modifying it. We have conducted a comparison between DCL-KDM and other techniques for specifying and generating PAs. The results showed that DCL-KDM is an efficient alternative to to generate instances of the Structure metamodel as a PA and to serialize it.