Analysis of Software Architectures: Achievements and Challenges

It has been a dozen years since Perry and Wolf first articulated the concepts underlying a modern understanding of software architecture, and research during the intervening years has produced a number of significant results in architectural modelling and analysis. Early analyses (such as dependence analysis and deadlock detection) were carried over 'as is' from other fields and arguably did not address the fundamental concerns of a software architect, in part because they only weakly accounted for the impact of architectural structure on system properties. In this talk I will discuss the important role that architectural structure plays as a basis of useful analyses, and I will describe recent work on three different structure-based architectural analyses--reliability analysis of component-based software, scalability analysis of software systems, and analysis of application fit for wide-area publish/subscribe architectures. These are by no means solved problems, and thus I will describe some of the challenges these problems offer for researchers in software modelling and analysis.

David Rosenblum is Professor of Software Systems at University College London (UCL) and Director of London Software systems, a joint research institute of the Software Systems Engineering Group at UCL and the Distributed Software Engineering Group at Imperial College London. His research interests are in distributed event-based computing and software validation. He currently holds a Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society of the UK. He has held positions in both industry and academia, including positions at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill), the University of California, Irvine, and PreCache, Inc., a Sony-funded startup that developed publish/subscribe networking technology. In 2002 he received the International Conference on Software Engineering's Most Influential Paper Award for his ICSE 1992 paper on assertion checking in C programs. He is an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and also served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He was program co-chair for ICSE 2004 and is currently the Chair of the ICSE Steering Committee. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the IET (formerly the IEE), and a Chartered Fellow of the BCS.

Verification of Security Protocols