A Systematic Approach to Design Domain-Specific Software Architectures

Since the first works involving software reuse, domain engineering is considered a key process to develop reusable and flexible software. However, the results have shown that there is still much to do before the vision of domain engineering is completely achieved. Among the reasons for this problem, we may highlight the lack of a process to support the design of domain-specific software architectures. This paper presents such an approach, based on a well defined set of principles, guidelines and metrics. We also present an experimental study that evaluated the viability of applying the approach in domain engineering projects.