Over the past decade and a half there has been increasing understanding about the role that software architecture can and should play in mastering the complexity of software system design, providing a basis for early analysis and prediction, ensuring that systems retain their structural integrity over time, and enabling reuse and dramatic cost reductions. In this talk I outline some of the key insights that drive the field and consider some of the salient features of software architecture as they relate to improving the dependability of software-based systems, focusing on techniques to (a) express architectural descriptions precisely and unambiguously; (b) provide soundness criteria and tools to check consistency of architectural designs; (c) analyse those designs to determine implied system properties; (d) exploit patterns and styles, and check whether a given architecture conforms to a given pattern; (e) guarantee that the implementation of a system is consistent with its architectural design; and (f) support self-healing capabilities.

David Garlan, Director of the Masters of Software Engineering Professional Programs and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He was the senior computer scientist in the Research Laboratory of Tektronix, Inc. Dr. Garlan's research interests include the application of formal methods to the construction of reusable software architectures, programming environments, tool integration, and interactive maps. He is the author of many books on software architecture, models,...and is author or co-author of numerous publications. David Garlan will talk on Architecture-driven Modelling and Analysis for Reliability and Performance.