ACME+ for software architecture analysis

During recent years, Software Architecture has attracted tremendous attention; since researchers and practitioners have recognized that analyzing system's architecture is an important part of the software development process. However, we find it paradoxical that no Architectural Description Language (ADL) in use nowadays has no means to automatically analyze quality attributes of software architectures such as response time, throughput, failure probability, security, availability, etc. In this paper, we propose Acme+ as an extension of Acme ADL, and discuss the development and operation of a compiler that compiles architectures written in this language and translate it to mathematical formulas which permit to analyze and reason about non functional attributes of software systems. Our work considers the architecture artifact written in an ADL and perform mathematical static analysis on it according to several non functional attributes. We have implemented the corresponding tool by using our compiler and Mathematica for both symbolic computing and numerical calculi.