A Generic Model for Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns at Architecture Level

Software architecture design is an important stage in the whole software development lifecycle. There are so many various concerns at architecture level which relate to all kinds of stakeholders and describe the all facets of problem domain. Unfortunately, they often tangle and scatter in the components and connectors, result in the final architecture solutions uneasy to evolve and reuse. So in this paper, we propose a generic model named ldquo1+Xrdquo which can separate the concern at architecture level along multiple dimensions. Also, we provide specification for each dimension and concerns in a dimension. This makes it possible to effectively cope with the crosscutting concerns at architecture level, encapsulate those using aspects or design decisions in the later architecture design activities.