The Relationship between Forward Slicing and Backward Slicing for Software Architecture

Software architecture slicing extracts the right software architecture to provide reference or design guiding for developing software architecture. It will reduce the complexity of the requirement specifications based on a selected slicing criterion of either the component or the connector, but little effort has been made regarding the relationship between forward slicing and backward slicing analysis at the architectural level. This paper combines architecture description language pi-architecture description language semantics to build pi behavior graph (pi BG) to represent the software architecture, and proposes methods for the coarse-grained software architecture slicing, which can reduce the number of components, connectors and constraints of pi BG. This method is based on the relationships between the port of the component and the role of the connector, which makes use of both forward and backward coarse-grained architecture slicing of pi BG. In order to understand the similarities and differences between the forward and backward architecture slicing techniques, some experiments are done. Two results are obtained: The first point is that the average percentage reduction of the backward coarse-grained architecture slice is equal to the average percentage reduction of the forward coarse-grained architecture slice. The second point is that the percentage reduction of the forward coarse-grained architecture slice cluster changes on average, while the percentage reduction of the backward coarse-grained architecture slice cluster change the quickly, and the more extreme cases.