UML Component Diagrams and Software Architecture - Experiences From the WREN Project

In the course of building Wren, a component-based development environment, the researchers encountered several difficulties when they tried to use UML component diagrams for modeling software architectures. One, the semantic interpretation of interfaces and dependencies is not clear in all cases. Two, component diagrams lack the expressive power to model unmet requirements. This paper describes the researchers' experiences with the use of UML component diagrams in the Wren project. Wren is a research prototype of a component-based development environment.