Concern-oriented analysis and refactoring of software architectures using dependency structure matrices

Abstract

Current scenario-based architecture analysis methods analyze the architecture with respect to scenarios that relate to stakeholder concerns. Albeit the primary motivation is to analyze the impact of stakeholders' concerns, it appears that concerns are not explicitly represented as first class abstractions. The lack of an explicit notion of concern in scenario-based analysis approaches can result in an incomplete analysis because scenarios are too specific and can only partially represent the concerns. We propose the concern-oriented architecture analysis method (COSAAM) that builds on scenario-based approaches but includes an explicit notion of concern in the analysis. COSAAM applies Dependency Structure Matrices (DSMs) to represent and analyze the dependencies among scenarios, concerns and architectural elements. Further, COSAAM extends DSMs by introducing explicit DSM patterns and heuristic rules for analyzing the impact of concerns on the architecture and for supporting the refactoring of the architecture. Copyright 2009 ACM.