Analysing Tactics in Architectural Patterns

This paper presents an approach to analyse the application of tactics in architectural patterns. We define and illustrate the approach using ARCHERY, a language for specifying, analysing and verifying architectural patterns. The approach consists of characterising the design principles of an architectural pattern as constraints, expressed in the language, and then, establishing a refinement relation based on their satisfaction. The application of tactics preserving refinement ensures that the original design principles, expressed themselves as constraints, still hold in the resulting architectural pattern. The paper focuses on fault-tolerance tactics, and identifies a set of requirements for a semantic framework characterising them. The application of tactics represented as model transformations is then discussed and illustrated using two case studies.