Assuring architectural properties during compositional architecture design

Nowadays, software architectures are built by reusing proven architectural building blocks. The several building blocks are composed together to form the desired software architecture. Each block has its specific architectural properties which were maybe also responsible for its choice. But these properties could be violated during composition with impact on the architecture's quality. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to assure architectural properties of architectural building blocks during the compositional design of software architectures. This approach describes properties of architectural building blocks as assurances. Assurances as well as the descriptions of architectural building blocks themselves are formalised in the same way. Furthermore, the assurances of the chosen architectural building blocks are examined in composed architectures.