Designing Software Architecture with Service Components using Design Structure Matrix

Abstract

Use-case-driven and architecture-centric approaches have been widely used to develop software systems, which also impose a great demand for a systematic approach to derive software architectures from requirements. As service-oriented computing (SOC) gains wide acceptance, the need to design an architecture that integrates web services becomes inevitable. To establish software architectures of web service systems from goals and use cases, we propose, in this work, a software architecture design approach with use case blocks and service components based on design structure matrix (DSM). Relations between goals and use cases are identified using DSM. Further, goals and use cases are partitioned into blocks by DSM partitioning mechanism to form an initial system architecture that includes subsystems or high level components. The candidate service components, reused service components or new reusable service components, among all subsystems or high level components are identified to provide the required services based on the dependency relations between use case blocks. The scenarios of the use cases are used to design classes/services of the corresponding subsystems/components. The proposed approach is illustrated by a benchmark problem domain of a meeting scheduler system.