  Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical
design level for software systems. As software architecture design resources
(in the form of architectural descriptions) are going to be accumulated, the
development of techniques and tools to support architectural understanding,
testing, reengineering, maintaining, and reusing will become an important
issue. In this paper we introduce a new dependence analysis technique, named
architectural dependence analysis to support software architecture development.
In contrast to traditional dependence analysis, architectural dependence
analysis is designed to operate on an architectural description of a software
system, rather than the source code of a conventional program. Architectural
dependence analysis provides knowledge of dependences for the high-level
architecture of a software system, rather than the low-level implementation
details of a conventional program.
