A practical architecture-centric analysis process

When engineering complex and distributed software and hardware systems (increasingly used in many sectors, such as manufacturing, aerospace, transportation, communication, energy and health-care), dependability has became a must, since failures can have economics consequences and can also endanger human life. Software Architectures (SA) can help improving the overall system dependability, providing a system blueprint that can be validated and that can guide all phases of the system development. Even if much work has been done on this direction, three important topics require major investigation: how different analysis techniques can be integrated together, how results obtained with SA-based analysis can be related to requirements and coding, and how integrate new methodologies in the industrial software development life-cycle. In this paper we propose an architecture-centric analysis process which allows formal analysis driven by model-based architectural specifications. This analysis process satisfies the industrial requirements, since it is tool supported and based on semi-formal (UML-based) specifications.