Understanding Tradeoffs among Different Architectural Modeling Approaches

Over the past decade, a number of architecture description languages (ADLs) have been proposed to facilitate modeling and analysis of software architecture. While each claims to have various benefits, to date, there have been few studies to assess the relative merits of these approaches. In this paper, we describe our experience using two ADLs to model a system initially described in UML, and compare their effectiveness in identifying system design flaws. We also describe the techniques we used for extracting architectural models from a UML system description.