Aladdin: A Tool for Architecture-Level Dependence Analysis of Software Systems

The emergence of formal architecture description languages provides an opportunity to perform analyses at high levels of abstraction, as well as early in the development process. Previous research has primarily focused on developing techniques such as algebraic and transition-system analysis to detect component mismatches or global behavioral incorrectness. In this paper, we present Aladdin, a tool that implements chaining, a static dependence analysis technique for use with architectural descriptions. Dependence analysis has been used widely at the implementation level to aid program optimization, anomaly checking, program understanding, testing, and debugging. We investigate the definition and application of dependence analysis at the architectural level. We illustrate the utility of chaining, through the use of Aladdin, by showing how the technique can be used to answer various questions one might pose of a Rapide architecture specification.